many things besides beauty, and the mind often experiences under the stimulus an exaltation derived from sources in which beauty is quite subordinated. Nowhere is this error of judgment so palpable as when shown in expression of admiration for the beauty of the dead. Death is so repugnant to life, that the dead cannot be beautiful. The emotion excited in the mind, especially by the dead who have been loved, clouds the judgment as to the character of the emotion experienced. With the lost lines of petty care, the face sometimes assumes an expression of nobility, hay of majesty itself. But the satisfaction thence derived is not from the perception of the beautiful; it is because the sublime has entered upon the scene. Needless it ought to be to say that this awful sublimity is incompatible with expression of the purely beautiful. The real character of the sentiment awakened by the presence of death was never better expressed than in the lines of Burton :

Here lies a common man. His horny hands,
Crossed meekly as a maid's upon his breast,
Show marks of toil, and by his general dress
You judge him to have been an artisan.
Doubtless, could all his life be written out,
The story would not thrill nor start a tear;

He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time,
And now rests peacefully, with upturned face,
Whose look belies all struggles in the past.
A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seen

The greatest of the earth go stately by,
While shouting multitudes beset the way,
With less of awe. The gap between a king
And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd,

Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now
Betwixt us two, this dead one and myself.
Untitled, dumb and deedless, yet he is
Transfigured by a touch from out the skies,
Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace,

The strange and sudden Dignity of Death.

In short, the beautiful is that which, whether in nature or art, possesses perfection of parts harmonized by unity. The picturesque, on the other hand, is that lower degree of beauty

which, although lacking unity, still possesses such pleasuregiving elements as to gratify the eye. Is it not undeniable that the picturesque is more soft and tender in its action upon the sensibilities than is the purely beautiful? Is not the beautiful, as nearly ideal as we know it, still a thing so cold and lofty that it does not affect to tenderness as does the picturesque? Painless perception must be, as little complex as is possible, for them to represent truly the beautiful and the picturesque.

Having now discussed the principal traits of the beautiful and the picturesque, it will be the most gallant thing to reserve for the following chapter the subject of the beauty of the fair sex.

WR

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SOURCE OF THE BEAUTY OF THE FAIR SEX.

E wonder if it has ever occurred to the reader to imagine why the female sex happens to be the fair sex. If, however, he or she has read attentively the second chapter of this work, at least a shrewd suspicion must have been awakened that the difference might be derived from the continuous action of sexual selection.

It may be asked why it is not the male, as shown in that chapter with reference to the lower animals, but the female, among mankind, which is the handsomer individual of those representing the sexes? To answer that will require study of the differences in the lives in question, and in the conditions by which they are surrounded. It was shown in that second chapter, through a sketch of the amatory lives and habits, principally of gallinaceous fowls, that the law of combat chiefly determined the most successful mating, and therefore, incidentally, the transmission and enhancement of certain male attributes to the males of the brood. Health and strength, as was indicated, are the necessary bases of courage and beauty. It was, therefore, remarked that, in the long run, these latter must necessarily predominate in the broods of successful suitors, who, in turn, in the competition with others not so highly endowed, would be more certain than they to transmit their attributes in increasing excellence to their progeny.

The preference by females among these animals is not exercised in the same way as among human beings. The male, as belonging to a species of the lower animals, is, as he is not among the higher races among human beings, unrestrainedly impulsive in sexual attraction. Through that impulsiveness lie

is, in the state of nature, the chooser of one or more females, not so much as individuals as belonging to the aggregate of females whose presence excites him to jealousy and battle for the possession of what may, so to speak, be called the female element of nature, irrespective of individuality. In a word, the male, in a state of nature, takes a female or females, largely as such, and cannot, in the highest sense, be said to select them. As among the males, however, there is the sternest competition for females as such, leading to fighting, to the wounding, defeat, or death of adversaries, and as preference among the females for the attributes possessed by the victors is inseparable from their falling to the victors as the reward of their strength, skill, and prowess, any beauty which is in the individual victor, associated in varying degree with his pugnacious capacity, comes to be more attractive to the female, appreciated, and reproduced by her. It is transmitted by her chiefly to the male portion of her brood (for it is of male attributes of which we are speaking) and becomes intensified from the same causes in successive broods. And hence it becomes apparent how the female among such birds, and relatively among animals generally, remains comparatively unadorned, while the males among them constitute fair sex.

Now, analogous causes have been, under entirely changed conditions, instrumental in bringing it about that, among mankind, the female, and not the male, sex is in many places the fair sex. The female sex is not invariably, even among mankind, the fair sex. Among savage peoples the women are, save a favored few belonging to a king or chief, repressed to such a degree that the men are invariably better favored in face and form. With all the physical disabilities of the sex, savage women do the drudgery of the tribe, and, even when the men are on the march, are compelled to bear a full share of exhausting labor. Child-bearing and the cares of maternity, added to this

weary life, leave no margin for the acquisition of beauty. They are even without the stimulus of the tenderness that gives strength. It is the testimony of African travelers that they never saw a negro caress or bestow the slightest endearment upon a woman. The women, bought and sold, are mere beasts of burden, and, without being always slaves in name, are so in effect to their lords and task-masters. Among the Indians of this continent the same conditions have prevailed from time immemorial. The men have been, as they are in Africa to this day, warriors and huntsmen, disdaining labor, who have shifted the toil of daily life upon the shoulders of their women. Hence it has come about, from two causes, that the men are physically superior to the women. Athletic exercises taken in the open air, especially when not pursued as such, are the most conducive of any to physical development and lustiness. The women naturally accept the protection of the strongest and bravest of the tribe whom they can secure, and as these would not accept any but the most desirable, this, with the other cause, combines to make the men who survive as the fittest, the superiors of the women in physical endowments. Savage women, therefore, with the exception noted, never are nor can be, relatively to the men, regarded as the fairer sex. They are quite in the position, with regard to the other sex, of the lower animals. What is so touching about Millet's peasant women?-the revelation of grinding toil by their rounded shoulders and resigned faces. This same pathetic thing represents the lot of most savage women, except in those parts of the earth where nature has been so bountiful, amid strife which is not constant, as amply to supply the simple wants of the people.

The complexity of civilization represents conditions radically different from these. Amid them, the agencies described reach apparently, but not really, fundamentally different results. The multiplicity of details obscures perception of the