Notes on Noses

63

Class IV.—The Jewish, or Hawk Nose, is very convex, and preserves its convexity like a bow, throughout the whole length from the eyes to the tip. It is thin and sharp.

It indicates considerable Shrewdness in worldly matters; and deep insight into character, and facility of turning that insight to profitable account.

This is a good, useful, practical Nose, very able to carry its owner successfully through the world, that is as success is now-a-days measured, by weight of purse; nevertheless it will not elevate him to any very exalted pitch of intellectuality.

It is called the Jewish Nose in conformity with long-established nomenclature, and is, perhaps more frequent among the Jews than among most other nations resident in Europe. It is, however a fallacy to suppose that the peculiar physiognomy called Jewish is confined to the Jews, or even exclusively characteristic of them. It is in fact a form of profile common to all the inhabitants of Syria; and Sir G. Wilkinson has proved in his erudite work on Ancient Egypt, that the nations represented in the Egyptian sculptures with this cast of countenance are not always intended for Jews, as was at one time supposed, but for Syrians. Moreover, this form of countenance 90is to this day, the usual one among the Arabs of that part of the world. This Nose should therefore more properly be called the Syrian Nose.

This fact enables us to extend our illustrations, by adducing divers national proofs of the correctness of the indications ascribed to this Nose.

We have said that it is a good, useful, practical Nose, i. e. a good money-getting Nose, a good commercial Nose, and perhaps the latter term would be an apt secondary designation for it. Hence, those nations which have been most largely gifted with it, have been always celebrated for their commercial success.

The Phœnicians were Syrians, and the portraits which we have of these people on the Egyptian sculptures, as read by Sir G. Wilkinson, all exhibit this form of Nose. It is unnecessary to enlarge on the very early commercial activity of this nation, on its extensive traffic, its flourishing colonies, and its mighty fleets. While the rest of the world was in barbarism, or kept their low civilization carefully locked up within their own dominions, the Phœnicians were spreading arts and letters among the barbarous nations of Europe, and carrying civilization forward on its destined course towards the West. And the incentive to this and the means whereby it was effected were the same as those which now animate modern Tyre to promote the same Westward tendency of civilization. What Phœnicia, a little western corner of Asia, did for Europe, England, a little western corner of Europe, has done and is doing for lands still further West—America and Austral-Asia; destined to be in their turns the seats of a still progressive civilization, until every part of the earth shall have been in succession blessed with a civilization, if not always equal in degree, always adequate to its age, requirements, and capacity.

Then when the whole circle shall have been accomplished—and of which more than two-thirds have been already passed over—when civilization in Austral-Asia shall touch the confines of its original starting point, the Eastern shores of India, the consummation of all things shall be at hand; the purpose for which the earth was created, and for which millions of years have been slowly, 91surely, and silently beautifying, storing, and adapting it, until it is like “the Garden of the Lord,” shall have been fulfilled; and the whole of this beautiful system shall vanish away like a breath, yet leave no vacuity, no defect, in the vast and mighty universe, whose limits utterly transcend our notions of time and space.

Two-thirds of this circle have been already passed over; the remaining third is rapidly running out: we already stand half-way between the beginning and the end of this third part; nay, we are nearer the end than the beginning, we see more clearly and apprehend more closely the day when Austral-Asia shall be the seat of civilization and Christianity, than we do the day when those blessings seventeen hundred years ago, first landed on our shores; we feel more affinity for, and more sympathy with, the latter age than with the former, and we may be assured that we do this because we are much nearer in Time to the one than to the other.

This is an awful contemplation; we cannot but feel that there is an extra responsibility cast upon us upon whom literally “the ends of the world are come,” and that it concerns us more than all who have gone before to be up and be doing; to take heed that while civilization is progressing geographically, it is also progressing in power and character; for upon the extent and nature of the Knowledge which we transmit, depend in a great degree the extent and nature of the Knowledge which shall ever reign on the earth.

Theologically considered, the subject is infinitely more awful and important; and the mind cannot contemplate without fear and trembling, what may be the consequences if we, instead of a pure and perfect, transmit to the few generations yet to subsist on the earth, an impure and imperfect, Christianity.

But to return to our more immediate subject. The Jews have always been celebrated for shrewdness in commercial affairs. Though the peculiarities of their religion prevented them from taking a leading part in the general commercial business of the ancient world, yet among themselves trade always flourished; and in the present age of 92the world, the Jews were in all countries the first revivers of commerce after the stagnation occasioned by the irruptions of the northern hordes, and in many nations are still almost the only traders.

It does not always follow, however, that the love and capacity for getting money is accompanied by a sordid disinclination to part with it. Numerous instances occur of persons who shrewdly bargain for pence, but liberally give away pounds. As we may seem to have inferred that the former is a Jewish habit, it is right, and we are happy to be able to say, that some instances of princely liberality among modern Jews, afford lessons which Christians would do well to take.

No very exalted intellectuality is to be looked for from the Syrian Nose. Its sphere of action is widely different from that of mental exertion for the mere pleasure thence derivable. Hence, we find, that notwithstanding the free intercourse which the Phœnicians permitted with all nations, the ancient sages rarely travelled to Phœnicia for learning. If they went there, they went like Solomon, to traffic. They sought learning among the Chaldeans, the Indians, and the Egyptians, but seldom touched in their course on the more accessible shores of Phœnicia. The Phœnicians have had the reputation of being the inventors of letters because they introduced them into Europe; but they were the mere carriers of them for commercial purposes, not the inventors.

Though some attempts have been lately made to prove that the Hebrew nation has furnished more learned men than any other, the attempts are an utter failure.

Curious wranglers, ingenious cabalists, fine splitters of hairs, shrewd perverters of texts, sharp detectors of discrepancies, clever concocters of analogies, finders of mysteries in a sunbeam, constitute the mass of modern^[41] Jewish scholars. What is the Talmud, the Mishna, the Gemara, or any of their comments thereon, or on Scripture, but mere puerile exercises of wit; sometimes ingenious, but always reckless of truth, decency, or common sense? We 93search in vain, as far as our knowledge of those works extends, and all who have studied them corroborate our opinion, for any expanded views, any comprehensive ideas or extensive learning. Neither does their ancient history furnish any but inspired names, to class among the world’s sages.

Education is however rapidly extending among the Jews. For the first time since they ceased to be a nation they appear to begin to feel the importance of raising themselves to an equal intellectual rank with the citizens among whom their lot is cast. This is the natural consequence of the accordance to them of equal national privileges—a still further extension of which, even to a seat in the Legislature, would promote their further elevation in the social scale.

Numerous schools have recently been founded by them for the education of their own people—both male and female—in England and other European States. From these the most beneficial results may be anticipated.

It has always been found to be the greatest obstacle to the spread of Christianity among a people who à priori might be supposed to be the most ready to receive it as a proof of the truth and fulfilment of their own Scriptures, that they know not these Scriptures; but are either immersed in the grossest ignorance, or glean their religion from the Talmud and the Mishna. It has been justly said, “The Jews must be made Old Testament Jews before they can be made Christians;” and this can only be done by education among themselves creating a spontaneous spirit of inquiry into their own literature, with an anxious desire to read and comprehend the vast storehouse of Biblical treasure at present almost unknown to the large majority of them.

The sources of our individual illustrations treating only of those who have distinguished themselves in Literature or History furnish only a few examples of the Jewish Nose.

may serve, however, to illustrate and corroborate our 94theory. As to the last, the connection between his Nose and the peculiar bias of his mind is obvious.

“The founder of the Science of Political Economy” must have possessed a natural attraction towards commercial affairs; and it could only have been by a very large share of acute observation and shrewd penetration that he could have worked out the principles of so abstruse a science, and made it acceptable to the mass of mankind.

“It was,” says one of his admirers, “one of the few, but greatest, errors of Adam Smith, that he was too apt to consider man as a mere money-making animal, who will never hesitate to work provided he is well paid for it. He does not consider that the desire of power and of esteem are more powerful principles than the desire of wealth.”

It is impossible to desire a description of his character more exactly correspondent to the form of his Nose.

It has been much disputed among his biographers whether Correggio was rich or poor. Many anecdotes are related which indicate his extreme poverty; while on the other hand, numerous facts seem to prove that he must at least have been in easy circumstances. He married a lady of good fortune, and he was well appreciated in his 95own time, and received many valuable orders for paintings from patrons of high rank and great liberality. It is however undisputed that his disposition was penurious and miserly, and this fact—indicated also by his unusually well-developed hawk-nose—will serve to reconcile the apparently contradictory assertions of his biographers.

It is probable that, like most misers, he was always complaining of poverty, and even denied himself necessaries which he could have well afforded. Those who credited these complaints, recorded his poverty and lamented over it with mistaken kindness; while others, who more critically considered his actual means, would better appreciate them and reveal the true state of the case. There is an anecdote recorded of him by his friend and cotemporary, Vasari, which though it may not be wholly true, has probably some foundation. This characteristic anecdote is to the effect, that having received a payment of sixty crowns in copper, he carried it home on foot in sultry weather, and the over-fatigue brought on a fever, of which he died. It is not, as Gibbon has shrewdly remarked, of much importance whether an anecdote of a person is actually true or false; for it almost equally displays the character of the person of whom it is recorded. A tale of liberality is not told of a known miser; nor an instance of penuriousness of a liberal man. An anecdote, to be received, must 96at least be probable and have an air of verisimilitude. Neither, considering the character of Correggio, is there any such inconsistency in the story as to render it incredible. The objection that sixty crowns in copper would weigh two hundred pounds, and therefore be an impossible weight for a man to carry, is a mere quibble. It only proves that the quantity is exaggerated, and not that the main story is false.

The character of Vespasian has been painted in the brightest colours. Avarice alone sullied his virtues. This must have been no slight or temporary blot, or his eulogist and client, Tacitus, would not have recorded it. It was too palpable and notorious to be concealed, and the historian found himself, however reluctantly, compelled to confess it.

It is not improbable, that he inherited this vice; for his father, having saved money in the business of a collector 97of the revenue and retired from the office, was unable to resist the love of gain, and subsequently acquired a considerable fortune by lending money at usurious interest. The prudence and sagacity with which the young Vespasian regulated his conduct during the dangerous reigns of the brutal Caligula and Nero, indicates his penetration and sagacity. It must have been by no trifling tact and ingenuity that he escaped death for the heinous offence of appearing inattentive while the Emperor Nero was singing. The same shrewdness and insight into character enabled him while in a private station to redeem his ruined fortune by horse-dealing; a science always notorious for its unscrupulous scheming and dishonest sharp practice; and in which the hawk-nosed Syrian Arabs have ever excelled all other nations.

Titus, the successor and son of Vespasian, inherited his father’s profile, and it is a marked corroboration of our theory that avarice is the only vice attributed to that otherwise virtuous prince.

It must, however, be observed, that the Noses, both of Vespasian and his son, were not purely Jewish, but Judæo-Roman IV
I; a formation which corresponds accurately with other peculiarities in the character of those great generals, too well known to need further elucidation.

The form of the former is sufficiently indicated by its name. The latter is distinguished by its presenting a continuous concavity from the eyes to the tip. It is converse in shape to the Jewish Nose. N.B. It must not be confounded with a Nose which, belonging to one of the other Classes in the upper part, terminates in a slight distention of the tip; for this, so far from prejudicing the character, rather adds to it warmth and activity.

98We associate the Snub and the Celestial in nearly the same category, as they both indicate natural weakness; mean, disagreeable disposition; with petty insolence, and divers other characteristics of conscious weakness, which strongly assimilate them (indeed, a true Celestial Nose is only a Snub turned up); while their general poverty of distinctive character makes it almost impossible to distinguish their psychology. Nevertheless, there is a difference between their indications; arising, however, rather from degree than character. The Celestial is, by virtue of its greater length, decidedly preferable to the Snub, as it has all the above unfortunate propensities in a much less degree, and is not without some share of small shrewdness and fox-like common sense; on which, however, it is apt to presume, and is, therefore, a more impudent Nose than the Snub.

It is with considerable distaste and reluctance that we approach the latter divisions of our Classification. Pœnitet me hujus Nasi. We wish we had never undertaken to write of these Noses. Having done so, however, we must fulfil our engagement. But the mind shrinks from the thought, that after contemplating the powerful Roman-nosed movers of the world’s destinies, or the refined and elegant Greek-nosed arbiters of art, or the deep and serious-minded thinkers with Cogitative Noses, it must descend to the horrid bathos, the imbecile inanity of the Snub.

Perhaps the reader expects that we are going to be very funny on the subject of these Noses. But we are not;—far from it. A Snub Nose is to us a subject of most melancholy contemplation. We behold in it a proof of the degeneracy of the human race. We feel that such was not the shape of Adam’s Nose; that the original type has been departed from; that the depravity of man’s heart has extended itself to its features, and that, to parody Cowper’s line, purloined, by the bye, from Cowley:

Fortunately for our hypothesis, and for our feelings, we cannot find a single instance of the existence of either the Celestial or the Snub among celebrated persons, except in those who are illustrious by courtesy rather than by their actions, and whom station, not worth, has made 99conspicuous. The following are the only instances of the Celestial Nose which our pictorial sources furnish:—

The “British Solomon” was unquestionably a witty man, without being a wise one. In a subsequent chapter, we take occasion to observe, that the exhibitions of character in women are, from different causes, diverse from those in men; and that as to the Celestial Nose, a woman so endowed appears more witty than a similarly nosed man, because she can dare to say what his fear of corporeal chastisement would restrain. But kings, by their position, are placed above such fear, and assume by their rank what is granted to a woman for her sex. Hence the impudence of the Celestial may develop itself in a king; and James I was enabled to utter witticisms which he would have prudently kept within his breast had he occupied an inferior station.

There are few individuals of whom more smart things are recorded than of James I; but they are nearly all of a character which none but a chartered libertine—a king, a fool, or a woman—dare utter.

Peculiar circumstances won Kosciusko somewhat of a name, for it was rather from sympathy with his cause than from admiration of his abilities, that it was ever bruited in men’s mouths, or is yet remembered. Had he been gifted with a Roman Nose, that is, had his soul been Roman, energetic, dignified and self-reliant, Poland might have risen again into the rank of nations. But he submitted to crouch beneath the rod of Napoleon, temporizing and treating for benefits for which it was his duty to have fought; and the nation, which looked to him for assistance, was compelled to share his degraded fate, and become the despised tool of an all-grasping despot. He had, however, a share of the Cogitative with the Celestial; and thus 100affords an instance of an union so rare, that it is only to be regarded as an exception to the rule laid down, that Class III is never associated with V and VI.

Boswell, who has attained that sort of eminence which a monkey might secure by mounting itself on the head of an elephant, affords a striking corroboration of all the characteristics attributed to the Snubbo-Celestial Nose. What a contrast between his short, retroussé nose and the profoundly Cogitative and well-developed proboscis of the literary giant on whose broad shoulders he elevated himself, to display his mountebankism, and the self-degradation of which his silly vanity made him unconscious. It was the very excess of his self-esteem which made him unconscious of the kicks and blows which his self-esteem was continually doomed to receive at the hands of his “illustrious friend.” His impudent vanity and blind obtuseness rendered him insensible to the taunts and jeers, the ridicule and contempt, which were lavished upon his imperturbable imbecility. The great moralist tolerated his presence for the sake of his flattery, and the utility of his companionship when no one else would familiarize themselves with the “literary bear.” Habit made his presence essential; and Boswell—rather from natural weakness than studied servility—was too useful a target for the arrows of 101the cross satirist, to be lightly laid aside by one to whom disputation and contradiction were necessary stimulants.

Every page in Boswell’s biography of Johnson demonstrates the meanness of his disposition and the weakness of his mind, redeemed only by a certain small shrewdness and fox-like common sense, very useful to draw out the aphorisms of his patron. His inherent impudence prompted him to thrust himself into the society of the great literary characters of the day, Johnson, Voltaire, Rousseau, &c., where his vanity and self-esteem, coupled with his obtuseness of intellect, sustained him, by rendering him as impervious to their sarcasms and rebuffs, as the hide of the rhinoceros is to the darts which would speedily annihilate a more highly organized and sensitive animal.

Nevertheless, the world owes much to Boswell’s imbecility. His mind was a tabula rasa, on which were written down for our edification the sayings of a great sage, pure and unalloyed, but which, if transmitted through a mind of greater capacity, would have lost much of their truthfulness and fidelity.

Murat presents an instance of an illustrious Snub. But it is notorious that Murat was never anything but a tool in the hands of Napoleon. He was quite incompetent to stand alone. He was a peacock’s feather in the hands of a juggler—veering with the directive motion and breath of the skilful balancer. Where he was laid, there he lay; where he was set up, there he stood. Such men were very needful to Napoleon. They were his best puppet-kings, by which he hoped to govern Europe. Sometimes he made a mistake, as in Bernadotte and his brother Louis; but Murat and Joseph were most skilfully selected to obey his ambitious impulses. Perhaps—as he is said to have chosen able men for their long noses—he selected these for their Snubs. Murat especially rejoiced in a most egregious Snub, and certainly exhibited no mental qualifications to belie the inference to be drawn from that form of Nose.

It is an important and very obvious corroboration of the truth of Nasology, that the noses of children are generally Snub or Celestial. This arises from their minds being 102unformed, and their characters undeveloped. As they grow up, their minds gradually expand, their characters assume individuality; and, coincident therewith, their Noses acquire the formation expressive of their mental tendencies.

In little children, Snub or Celestial Noses are beautiful, because they are congruous with our ideas of the ductility and gentleness of childhood. A child with a great Roman nose projecting from its rounded cheeks and innocent eyes, would be an ugly child, though every feature were individually perfect, because its nose would bespeak a force and independence of mind which are revolting in a little child.

As we should recoil from a child which endeavoured to entertain us with discourse suitable to a man of mature years, instead of with innocent prattle, so we instinctively dislike in a child the features belonging to manhood. The beautiful harmony which reigns throughout all the works of Nature, is in nothing more manifest than in the congruity between the mind and the features, especially in characterizing infantile and undeveloped minds by infantile and undeveloped features.

For the same reasons that the Snub prevails among children, the same form prevails among savage nations and the uneducated classes of civilized states. The Noses of nations very low in the scale of civilization are for the most part of a very flat and mean formation, of which several instances will be adduced in a subsequent chapter; and the Noses of the uneducated classes in every country exhibit for the most part a greater proportion of Snubs and Celestials than the Noses of the more highly educated portions of the community: and this is more marked when the want of education has subsisted for several successive generations.

From fictitious works, which have raised to celebrity imaginary characters of every mental calibre, innumerable examples might be adduced; for all accurate observers, whether ancient or modern, have—without being professed Nasologists—unconsciously verified our hypothesis, and associated the Nose with character.

103The inimitable Dickens, and his equally clever illustrator Cruikshank, both of whom owe their power to their correct observation and delineation of character, afford many well-known examples. Had the hypothesis been founded on Oliver Twist and its illustrations, it could not have been more strikingly substantiated by them, than it is—thus proving that if we err, we err in company with observers of more than common accuracy, and whose observations have been verified by the applauses of all. In that work we have the shrewd penetrative Jew with his Hawk-nose; the mild, but high-minded Oliver Twist, with his fine Greek Nose; the Artful Dodger and his brother-pals with their characteristic Snubs and Celestials. A reference to the plates, and the author’s pen-and-ink portraits, in this and other works, will confirm our right to claim these artists in pen and pencil as Nasologists.

The same remarks would be equally applicable to Hogarth’s illustrations of life in every grade. Observe the important use he makes of the Nose to elevate or degrade his characters. Compare for this purpose the Romano-Greek Nose of the Industrious Apprentice with the Snubbo-Celestial Nose of the Idle Apprentice. Nor does Hogarth fall into the vulgar error of ridiculing rank and station by features; with him features indicate mind only. He used them to exhibit intellect and honesty, or imbecility, vice, and vulgarity, in whatever station. The Distressed Poet in his garret has a more intellectual nose and countenance than the vicious and noble in Marriage à-la mode, or the imbecile fop in the Rake’s Progress.

Raffaelle likewise avails himself of the Nose to give intellectual power and dignity to the Apostles, Peter and John, in contrast with the uneducated beggar whose lameness they miraculously cured at the beautiful gate of the Temple.

Even the distinctive characters of the two Apostles are developed in their Noses; the loving, confiding, gentle John by a Greek Nose, the energetic and fiery Peter by a Roman Nose.

But why multiply instances when every accurate pourtrayer of character furnishes abundant examples?

104The only authority which we have consulted on the subject of Noses, is one from whose works we have already quoted. It never can be forgotten that the inimitable Tristram Shandy has slightly touched upon the subject when describing the unhappy catastrophe which, even in his very earliest years, demolished his Nose.

It appears that Mr. Shandy, senior, was a sagacious, an observant, and a learned man. We need not add, therefore, that he was deeply impressed with the importance of his son having a good Nose; and most pathetic was his sorrow when the bridge of it was broken. His own family had suffered through several generations from a defect in the length of an ancestor’s Nose. His great-grandfather, when tendering his hand and heart to the lady who afterwards consented to make him “the happiest of men,” was forced to capitulate to her terms, owing to the brevity of his Nose.

“It is most unconscionable, Madam,” said he, “that you, who have only two thousand pounds to your fortune, should demand from me an allowance of three hundred pounds a year.”

“Because you have no Nose, Sir.”

“’Sdeath! Madam, ’tis a very good Nose.”

“’Tis for all the world like an ace-of-clubs.”

“My great-grandfather was silenced:” and for many years after the Shandy family was burdened with the payment of this large annuity out of a small estate, because his great-grandfather had a Snub Nose. Well might Mr. Shandy (the father of Tristram) say, “that no family, however high, could stand against a succession of short Noses!”

In lack of other instances, we have introduced those of fictitious writers; for they corroborate our views, and serve to thicken other proofs which in this Class do demonstrate thinly. And this necessarily so. For we have determined to refrain from giving examples from our personal acquaintance, and the Snubs have never any of them won such eminence, as to have their names handed down by fame, or their portraits limned for the benefit of posterity. The evidence in these two last Classes is necessarily negative.

105Their best proof lies in their want of proofs. They will, however, receive some general illustration when we come to speak of national Noses.

It now only remains to treat of some obstinate Noses which will not come within our classification.

One of these is that curious formation, a compound of Roman, Greek, Cogitative, and Celestial, with the addition of a button at the end, prefixed to the front of my Lord Brougham. We are bound from its situation to admit that it is a Nose, and we must, therefore, treat of it; but it’s a queer one. “Sure such a Nose was never seen.”

It is a most eccentric Nose; it comes within no possible category; it is like no other man’s; it has good points, and bad points, and no point at all. When you think it is going right on for a Roman, it suddenly becomes a Greek; when you have written it down Cogitative, it becomes as sharp as a knife. At first view it seems a Celestial; but Celestial it is not; its Celestiality is not heavenward, but right out into illimitable space, pointing—we know not where. It is a regular Proteus; when you have caught it in one shape, it instantly becomes another. Turn it, and twist it, and view it how, when, or where you will, it is never to be seen twice in the same shape, and all you can say of it is, that it’s a queer one. And such exactly is my Lord Brougham—verily my Lord Brougham, and my Lord Brougham’s Nose have not their likeness in heaven or earth—and the button at the end is the cause of it all.

Thus, though Lord Brougham’s Nose is an exception to our classification, it is not, as has been asserted, an exception to our system. On the contrary, it is manifestly a strong corroboration of it. The only exceptions are those where the character does not correspond with the Nose, and of those we have yet to hear.

There is another Nose which is not included in the classification, but which, though not peculiar to one individual, is nevertheless not sufficiently frequent to demand placing there. This we call the Parabolic Nose. It would have been a good Nose if it had gone on as it began; but 106having from some cause taken an inward curve too soon, its good qualities become nearly nullified. It presents a continued Parabolic curve, where it ought to extend into an angular tip. This sudden abbreviation of course weakens the character, but, as it leaves the good qualities of the upper part still inherent, the character retains good points; but being disabled from reasoning justly on its good intentions, it acquires the character of obstinacy, and of acting from pig-headedness, instead of from rational forethought.

George III. presents the best-known example of this Nose.

Another striking example occurs in Blanco White. There were considerable points of identity between their characters.

They were both honest, conscientious men, anxious to find out and pursue the right course, but both were too hasty in jumping to conclusions to form accurate judgments. Blanco White, anxious to embrace truth, led a regular harlequin dance after her all his life, and died in motley. One leg red and the other blue, with a jacket of various colours, and a coxcomb of brilliant self-conceit. His last verdict, after rambling through divers forms of religion and no religion, was, “I am neither Trinitarian, nor Unitarian, nor yet Arian.” First Roman Catholic, then Atheist, then Church of England, then Unitarian, then Arian, then Omniarian, his ardent, hasty mind settled like a butterfly on the first bright flower which fluttered in the breeze, for a time imbibed and luxuriated on its honey, and then flew off to suck the sweets of some other plant. Thus he fluttered on, a varied, anxious, unsettled existence, gathering honey, but making none; and when the colds and storms of winter came, he sank before them.

The instances of the Parabolic Nose are, however, too few among celebrated persons to enable us to supply illustrations probative of the accuracy of our notions of its indications. It is, however, by no means an uncommon Nose, and from personal observation among our cotemporaries, we should say that it is not a very desirable form, as we incline to think that it indicates obstinacy without any 107great elevation of mind, or deep capacity of reasoning. But it would perhaps, at present, be most prudent not to express decidedly what are its indications, &c. Should we be able to do so at any future time, it will be entitled to stand as Class VII.

The subject of Nasology would not be complete without some observations on the Feminine Nose, because sex modifies the indications, some of which, though disagreeable and repulsive in a man, are rather pleasing, fascinating, and bewitching in a woman, and vice versâ.

It is the fashion for women to aspire to equality with the other sex, and as long as they will be content with an equality, in a different orbit, they are undoubtedly entitled to it. It should, however, be the equality of planets—each perfect and beautiful, each useful and beneficial in its sphere; but pregnant with disorder and confusion when Venus would invade the orbit of Jupiter, or intrude within the circuit of Mars.

No intelligent man denies to woman such an equality; but as certainly as a good housewife would pin a dish-cloth to the coat-tail of a husband prying into the mysteries of the kitchen and claiming equality with his wife in the household sphere, so surely will men cry out against and turn with disgust from women who invade their province of warriors, statesmen, merchants, &c.

Nevertheless, let us not be misunderstood, or be accused of including in a sweeping clause those cases which are, of right, exceptions. A woman may be placed in such a position that active life is her legitimate sphere, and that if she neglects or devolves its cares upon others she is culpable. We all feel an enthusiastic respect for the noble Boadicea, arousing her pusillanimous countrymen against the cruel ravages of the Romans, and dwell with admiration on Elizabeth haranguing her army at Tilbury and 108personally engaging in affairs of State, because they were occupied in duties which became a monarch; yet if a woman, who has no call to any higher duties than those of domestic life, were to leave them to engage in the contests of warriors or the turmoil of politics, we should regard her as an unfeminine virago. Notwithstanding, though the woman may in some cases be needfully sunk in the station, those duties which become the former will still engage more of our love and regard than those which belong to the latter; and our own graceful Queen has secured, by her happy union of the duties of both, more of the love and respect of her people than any of her predecessors on the throne of these realms.

The energies and tastes of women are generally less intense than those of men; hence their characters appear less developed and exhibit greater uniformity. That their passions are stronger is undeniable, but these do not constitute character, nor are exhibited in the Nose. Their indexes are the eyes and mouth, and therefore their consideration forms no part of the present subject. This uniformity of character is noticed by Pope in a line which at first sight reads libellous, either because it appears to refer to moral conduct—which it does not—or because it is too sweeping and exaggerated. He asserts roundly,

No characters at all, is obviously false; but, as compared to men, as near the truth as most general epigrammatic rules are. It is in the latter sense that Pope used it to illustrate the difficulty of discussing “The characteristics of Women” after a dissertation on those of men. The line, however, was truer in his time than it is now, when more general and more liberal education has tended very much to break up the uniformity of character which existed among the inane ladies of Pope’s era.

Nevertheless, whether repressed by Art or curtailed by Nature, women’s characters certainly appear less developed than those of men. If by Nature, it is a blessed provision—as all nature’s providings are. It is the woman’s place to be in rational subjection to the man; and though the 109sweet saints would sooner tear out the eyes of St. Paul^[43] (we wonder he is such a favourite with them) than confess his precepts in terms, yet they do not fear to acknowledge that they have no respect for the man who succumbs to his wife, or admiration for the woman who aspires to denude her husband of his appropriate symbols of masterdom.

If this happy inferiority—an inferiority which places them far above men in practical wisdom, inasmuch as it consists in shrewd, practical common sense, against a man’s intellectual blundering—if this happy inferiority is the result of Art, they exhibit in its adoption much sound wisdom. Man is an insolent, domineering, self-sufficient animal—let him say what he will about the elevation of the female mind, we believe no man ever fell in love with the woman whom he felt to be wiser than himself. He could not endure for a partner for life, such a perpetual looking-glass and reminder of his own infirmities; he could not bear the constant attestation of his own weakness. He could regard patiently the vaunted accomplishments of another man, but he could not submit that his wife should be his acknowledged superior, and to be her foil—perhaps fool.

Hence it is that wise men, so frequently that it is become proverbial, marry silly women. However much a learned man may admire female accomplishments, he detests a woman who strives to rival him in his own sphere, who is talking philosophy when he would be whispering “soft nothings,” and who freezes his ardent admiration with a dissertation on mathematics, or a moral discourse on self-control. He can bend, like any other man, with intense joy, over the blushing girl who tremblingly believes that her eyes are brighter and more lovely than the stars over her head; but would fling from him with disgust the woman who would repress his harmless and true—because soul-felt—flattery, with a philosophical disquisition on the nature, distances, and offices of the aforesaid stars. And it is because learned women too often strive by this injudicious ill-timed wisdom, to catch learned men for husbands, (and there are no more determined husband-hunters 110than blue-stocking women, because they are always within a year or two of being shelved), that the latter are necessarily flung into the arms of women who they know can’t bore them with an eternal round of sense, from which every one is glad occasionally to escape, and never more so than when he is in love.

Hence it is that blue-stocking women are proverbially avoided by men; not because men despise or dislike their learning, but because they make such ill-timed use of it. They may be admired, but they are never loved; they may talk as learnedly as is in their power, but learning never won a lover, much less a husband. Ver. sap. my dear lady reader, and if you don’t understand the abbreviate, ask—ask—anybody, but your husband.

And shall heaven-born love bow to mortal wisdom? Shall the God whom Jove himself obeys, become the slave of Minerva? No! let Love wear the cap and bells of Folly, but shroud him not in the cold cerements of the Goddess of Wisdom! Be assured, the doves of Venus will never nestle under the dusky wings of the sage owl of innupta Minerva, who, herself, could never win a husband, or a lover, from the whole host of Olympus.

Whatever the cause, it is almost indisputable that women’s characters are generally less developed than those of men; and this fact accurately accords with the usual development of their Noses. But for a small hiatus in the prosody, Pope’s line would read equally well thus:—

Not, of course, that the nasal appendage is wanting, any more than Pope intended by the original line that women’s characteristics were wholly negative; but that, like their characters, their Noses are, for the most part, cast in a smaller and less developed mould than the Nose masculine.

In judging of the Nose feminine, therefore, comparison must not be made with the masculine, but with other feminine 111Noses. All the rules and classifications apply to the one as well as the other, but allowance is to be made for sex.

The Roman Nose largely developed in a woman mars beauty, and imparts a hardness and masculine energy to the face which is unpleasing, because opposed to our ideas of woman’s softness and gentle temperament. In a man we admire stern energy and bold independence, and can even forgive, for their sakes, somewhat of coarseness; but in a woman the former are, at the least, unprepossessing and unfeminine, and the latter is utterly intolerable. Woman’s best sustainer is a pure mind; man’s a bold heart.

Moreover, the exhibition of character in women should be different from that in men. From the masculine Roman Nose we may justly look for energy in the active departments of life, but in a woman its indications are appropriately exhibited in firmness and regularity in those duties which legitimately fall to her lot. We do not desire to see a woman so endowed, launch out, uncalled for, into the bustle and turmoil of the world, or endeavour to take the reins of government from her husband, though she may be equally well fitted for the task: but we are content to see her govern her household with energy, and train up her children in a systematic and uniform manner.

She will form her plans of household management with promptitude, and carry them out with undeviating firmness and decision; and her husband will act wisely, for his own sake, not to interfere with her, so long as her energy does not carry her into his department.

But if woman’s circumstances place her in a more extended sphere, her career will afford an example to illustrate our hypothesis as well as that of a man. Of this we have an example in the illustrious Roman Lady, Livia, the wife of Augustus.

Her Nose presents a combination of the Roman and the Greek, and contains as much of the former class as is compatible with female beauty. The accounts which are handed down concerning her are very contradictory: some describe her as chaste as the icicle that hangs on 112Dian’s temple, and qualified to lead a chorus of vestals, while others accuse her of licentiousness and criminal amours. It is, however, undeniable that she was a woman of considerable power of mind, which she exercised energetically and shrewdly in procuring the aggrandizement of her son Tiberius, on whose head she finally succeeded in placing the imperial tiara. Her Roman energy was nevertheless refined by an infusion of Greek elegance, and she was a liberal patroness of arts and literature. Her career likewise illustrates another maxim; that what woman’s character wants in development, is often compensated by superior passion. Livia was sustained more by the strength of her affections than by personal ambition. It was her son’s and not her own aggrandizement that she sedulously pursued; and if the lives of the majority of ambitious women were examined, it would be found that they more frequently sought to exalt some object of their affections—a husband or a child—than themselves.

This, however, was not the case with the purely Roman-Nosed Elizabeth. She had no affection for any one but herself; and the energy and determination, combined with 113the coarseness of her character, correspond accurately with the indications of her Nose.

The most beautiful form of Nose in woman is the Greek. It is essentially a feminine Nose, and it is in its higher indications that women generally excel.

This Nose will not carry them out of their natural sphere, and it is for this reason that it is so beautiful. Congruity is harmony; and harmony is essential to the beautiful. A woman gifted with the feelings of a poet, need not fear to give them full sway. In some of the most beautiful and touching departments of poetic talent women equal—perhaps excel—men. Scarcely half a century has elapsed since women were permitted to cultivate unreservedly the fields of literature, but that brief period has incontrovertibly proved the ability of women to pourtray with superior truth and pathos all that relates to the affections, the sentiments, and the moral and religious duties of mankind.

The names of Hannah More, Barbauld, Edgeworth, Tighe, Hemans, De Staël, and other lamented writers, together with those of several who still survive, place this assertion beyond the pale of controversy. The Noses of the above-named gifted women were Greco-Cogitative.

But the power of expression, though essential to a poet, is not necessary to a poetic mind. It may exist as strongly in one who has no words of fire to give its 114creations utterance as in one who pours forth in lavish self-abandonment the riches of his soul.

Neither is the Greek Nose a necessary index of a poetic faculty. That form may adorn the face, but no rapturous fervour exalt the mind; although it will frequently accompany a poetic temperament, because it indicates refinement and purity of taste. These are its invariable indications, and in these every woman so gifted will excel; for to excel in these is almost her peculiar province.

In the minor and domestic departments of life, where woman’s influence is so peculiarly blessed, the refinement of the Greek Nose will appear in those household arrangements which make home the happiest and most beloved spot on earth. It will exhibit itself in her needlework by an artistic arrangement of colours and a poetic choice of subjects; in a neat and elegant attire, in the decoration of her drawing-room, or in the paraphernalia of her boudoir. Nor need it be confined to those elegancies which seem to belong exclusively to the higher classes—a cup of flowers in a cottage window, the well-selected trimmings of a Sunday cap, or a pretty ornament on the mantel-shelf will equally be an evidence of a refined taste, and found to accompany the Greek Nose.

The Cogitative Nose does not so frequently appear among women as among men. Women rather feel than think. Their perceptions are instinctive, intuitive; men’s cogitative. They are shrewder and more instantaneous in estimating character, or in deciding an action, than men. Men must think, and fume, and fret, before they can decide; must, in common parlance, set the head (reason) against the heart (instinct); while women rely more on the latter, and are consequently, in judging of character, or in deciding on a course of moral conduct, more frequently right than men.

115Our advice to a man would be this: if you are at a loss, after long cogitation—as ten to one you will be—to know whether an intended act is morally right, ask a sensible woman, and she will guide you with perfect wisdom in a minute. So, again, if you would know any one’s moral character, let a sensible woman converse with him for five minutes, and she will tell you without fail whether he may be trusted. Only be careful to accept her first dictum; don’t argue the point with her, nor give her time to think; have her instinctive decision. If she thinks, she will be ten times more at fault than a man; and, if you argue the matter with her, she will lead you a dance through as fine a quagmire of absurdities as can be conceived, and there leave you, up to your neck in the slough, without the power—if not without the will—to help you out. And this needfully so. Instinct must ever be a better guide than Reason; for

“The perception of a woman,” says Sherlock, “is as quick as lightning. Her penetration is intuition, almost instinct. By a glance she will draw a quick and just conclusion. Ask her how she formed it, and she cannot answer the question. While she trusts her instinct she is scarcely ever deceived, but she is generally lost when she begins to reason.” A more accurate picture of the female mind was never drawn; yet some modern writers have fiercely controverted it. Under a mistaken notion of equalizing women with men, they seek to destroy the individualism of their character. One witty popular writer has even ventured to assert, that if half-a-dozen boys were brought up as girls, and half-a-dozen girls as boys, the latter would be to all intents psychologically men, and the former psychologically women. Surely a more preposterous absurdity never won the assent of the unthinking part of the community; nevertheless, it has been warmly applauded and often repeated, as if it were an ascertained fact instead of a ridiculous fancy.

The Jewish Nose is not very frequent among women. Neither are its indications material to the perfection of 116the female character. It is the duty of men to relieve women from the cares of commercial life, and to stand between them and those who would impose upon their credulity. Moreover, woman’s natural penetration supplies the want of the thoughtful sagacity which protects men in inter-commercial relations.

The remarks which we made on the Snub Nose and the Celestial Nose in men, require to be considerably modified when we treat of those classes in women.

The Celestial Nose feminine is that which has won so much admiration and celebrity among French writers under the designation of “le nez retroussé.” They almost universally acknowledge its irresistible piquancy and animation. According to Marmontel, “un petit nez retroussé renvers les lois d’un empire;” a dictum which we are not disposed to dispute.

We confess a lurking penchant, a sort of sneaking affection which we cannot resist, for the latter of these in a woman. It does not command our admiration and respect like the Greek, to which we could bow down as to a goddess, but it makes sad work with our affections. The former, too, is not so unbearable as in a man. It is a great marrer of beauty, undoubtedly; but merely regarded as an index of weakness, it claims our kindly consideration. Weakness in a woman—which is gentleness, feminacy—is excusable and rather loveable; while in a man it is detestable. It is woman’s place to be supported, not to support. Hence the classical emblem of the Vine and the Elm is felt to be beautiful and true, because it pourtrays accurately the natural mutual position of husband and wife. A woman, moreover, has generally tact sufficient to conceal (often to their entire annihilation) those unprepossessing characteristics of the Snub and the Celestial, which in a weak man become every day more and more strongly marked. A woman’s weakness, too, is rather flattering, as it attests our supremacy; a thing which we like to be constantly reminded of, and of which we are very jealous, as it stands on rather ticklish and much disputed ground.

The impudence, too, which is utterly unendurable in a 117male Celestial, and which seems to court contact with the toe of one’s boot, is in a woman rather piquant and interesting. A Celestial Nose in a woman is frequently an index of wit. Wit is a talent not emanating from wisdom; quite the reverse. The wisest men are ofttimes the slowest. Wisdom comes after thought, wit before it. A Celestial-nosed woman is only more witty than a similarly gifted man, because the impudence which it invariably indicates is backed by woman’s ever-ready tact and quickness.

The indications are not varied; but the exhibitions are. Even if a man were gifted with the power of uttering the severe witticisms and cutting repartees which are nectar and ambrosia from the lips of a pretty woman, he dare not; for he would be inevitably kicked down stairs—if the fellow were worth the exertion.

In a witty woman who can skirmish with unflinching quickness and dexterity, we can even forgive a slight moral delinquency. A little white-lie simpered out with arch assurance by a pair of demure lips,

by no means offends us as it would in a man; in whom we should attribute it to low cunning or mean cowardice. Indeed, the exquisite look of arch impudence with which a delicately chiselled marble-ine Celestial tells you a most palpable falsehood is maddening, perfectly beautiful, almost sublime. The cool assurance and sharp raillery with which she persists after detection! the assumption of injured innocence! the impudent look of defiance! By Jove! truly

And then when they are beaten from their last defence, and can resist no longer, when they are compelled to surrender and beg pardon, they do it as if they were forgiving you; and make you feel almost as if you were being forgiven, as if you, not she, had all the while been erring: at all events you feel very like a fool, though 118very happy; and so a few tears, and a few (or not a few) kisses set all to rights,

“Ha, ha, ha!” roars Mr. A. flinging down the book—which he has been reading aloud to his wife—in a paroxysm of laughter.

“It’s abominable!” exclaims Mrs. A., in high indignation, “and I wonder, Mr. A. you ain’t ashamed to read it.”

Mr. A. resumes the book, and his lady continues to listen with great interest, though apparently wholly absorbed by her crochet-work.

All things considered therefore, and inasmuch as we prefer the naturalness of a witty woman to the artificialness of a learned woman, we confess to a liking for the Celestial Nose feminine, while we abhor the masculine. It is not, however, every female Celestial Nose that we admire (Heaven, for our peace’s sake forbid—they are so numerous). It must be of the purest and most delicate chiselling; have no tendency to cogitativeness, lest it should look as if its owner thought; and its hue must be of the palest and most evanescent flesh-tint. These are essential to indicate that delicacy of mind which alone makes wit in a woman fascinating and which pardons breaches of strict morality committed from the purest and most benevolent intentions.

This sounds rather paradoxical, but an old Jacobite song will illustrate our meaning. The story goes that a gudewife concealed a north country cousin, one of the adherents of Charlie, in the house, unknown to the gudeman; and her ingenuity is sorely puzzled to account for certain suspicious phenomena which strike him on his coming home:—

And so in like manner she unblushingly persists, in order to preserve her guest’s life, that a saddle-horse is a milking cow, and a man’s coat a pair of blankets. Now we are sure this dear woman had a Celestial Nose; nothing else would have had the ready wit and impudent assurance to attempt so to befool her gudeman, and to persist, with the addition of no slight abuse of his dotard blindness, in her palpable falsehoods; yet we defy any one not to love the good woman, and excuse her breaches of morality for the sake of her hospitable benevolence.

Whenever two persons, the one having a large Nose and the other a small one, come into collision, the latter must inevitably yield, unless it is feminine, and takes a Celestial turn. It may then conquer, not by its wisdom or the force of argument, but by its persevering impudence, and harassing petty skirmishing. A wise man may, for the sake of peace and quiet, ostensibly yield to a noisy woman; though there is no real conquest, for he remains unconvinced.

But a Snub-nosed man must succumb, body and soul, to a Roman-nosed wife; she will assume the masterdom; she will endue the breeches; he cannot help himself; under her his nature is subdued, as Marc Antony’s was by Cæsar.

Take warning, therefore, ye Snub Noses; and if ye would be masters at home, marry your likes. Aspire not to wed feminine beauty; it is not for such as you. Marry Snubs; beget Snubs, till the race is extinct.

120We are conscious that in discussing female Noses, we are treading on delicate ground. It is a difficult and nervous subject. We have endeavoured, however, to say nothing but what appeared to us to be plain truth. Nevertheless we would apologize if we have given offence to any one, were it not that we forcibly feel the truth of the homely adage, “the least said the soonest mended,” and therefore hasten to close a chapter which has given us more trouble and anxiety than all the rest together.

The reader will probably have been led from the nomenclature to inquire whether the assertion that certain forms of Nose are justly named after certain nations might not be extended further? and whether every nation has not a characteristic Nose?

The reply to these questionings would be in the affirmative. Every nation has a characteristic Nose; and the less advanced the nation is in civilization, the more general and perceptible is the characteristic form. While nations are in their infancy, and the mass of the people are uninformed, the features receiving no impressions from within, take the form impressed from without, and follow the national type. If one uniform state of things—of government, climate, and habits—continue, without education, generation may succeed generation, and the original facial type of the race will remain. If, however, the national circumstances alter (still without general education) the national features follow the type impressed by those circumstances. We have appealed to many instances of these simultaneous national changes when describing the different forms of Noses prevalent at different periods of English history.

The existence of such typical features has always been recognized, and ethnologists have founded classifications of the Human Race on their peculiarities.

121It is an additional general proof of the truth of Nasology, that the most highly-organized and intellectual races possess the highest forms of Noses, and those which are more barbarous and uncivilized possess Noses proportionately Snub and depressed, approaching the form of the snouts of the lower animals, which seldom or ever project beyond the jaws. Thus the Caucasian races, denominated by Dr. Prichard Oval-headed, which comprise decidedly the most perfect specimens of the human race, are characterized by a Nose Roman or Greek; while the lower divisions, the Mongolian or Pyramidal-headed, and the Negro or Prognathous (protruding-jawed)—than among which no lower and more debased specimens of humanity subsist—have Noses Celestial or Snub, as in the Tartar and Chinese, the Negro and Hottentot nations.

In the Caucasian, or Elliptical-headed, types of the Human Race, the Nose averages one-third of the faces.

In the Mongolian, or Pyramidal-headed, the Nose averages from one-fourth to one-fifth of the face.

In the Negro, or Prognathous-jawed, it is the same, and the nostrils are conspicuous, as in brutes.

When hypotheses thus assist and strengthen each other, we gain an assurance of their truth and accuracy which is wanting where they are seemingly contradictory, and which would have been wanting to Nasology, had it contradicted the observations of philosophers so careful and able as Dr. Prichard and his fellow-labourers in the field of ethnology. Happily this is not the case, and Nasology may claim to stand as the handmaid of ethnologists striving to discover the characteristics of nations.

Among the more highly-organized races more deviations from the original typical patterns occur than among the lower-organized—because the minds of civilized men are more impressible than those of savages. Travellers have always observed that nothing struck them more on visiting a savage nation than the great uniformity of feature, presenting so great a contrast to the diversities among civilized nations; so that while a superficial observer would suppose it to be impossible to characterize 122the latter by any uniform description, he finds no difficulty in expressing the characteristics of the former.

Various degrees of culture and occupation produce the greatest possible variations among the individuals of civilized nations, while the uniform absence of education and the uniformity of pursuits among savages perpetuate, and perhaps confer, an uniform national physiognomy.

When education becomes general, nations lose their national typical features; for the physiognomy becomes so variously impressed from within, according to the different bias and affections of men’s minds, that it ceases to receive those impressions from without, which generate national types. At present, however, there is so little generally diffused education that the typical features of most nations may yet be defined.

These are not always the original types of the race. Numerous circumstances have among the more civilized nations contributed to produce changes of greater or less magnitude. The various Caucasian nations, for instance, though all descended from one stock, have varied from their original type in their divers migrations from the plains of Asia, and received such typical form as varying circumstances have since impressed. Hence the various Caucasian nations of Europe and Western Asia differ considerably from each other in mental and bodily organization.

These variations from the original type took place, however, at so early a period, even in the ante-historical period, that historians are apt to regard them as original and innate; and perhaps it is most convenient for them to do so. But this is not sufficient for the inquirer into the Races of Men. He goes back to ages far beyond the historical, or even the mythic, period; and, finding these nations are descended from one family, perceives that the present variations must have taken place after the dispersion of the family into distant localities under leaders of very various temperament and views of social happiness.

It would lead us too far to inquire whether the tendency of Nature to break up certain types into varieties, 123and form new races—perhaps even new species and genera—was not originally greater than it has been at any period within the knowledge of man. We see no changes take place now, such as long before even the mythic period, produced from one stock the wild urus, the domestic ox, and the hunched bull of India. Neither do we see new races of men spring up; such as in the very earliest times produced from one common ancestor the various diverse races of men; white, black, yellow, and red.

It is a singular proof both of the tendency of the human race to break into varieties at a very early period, and of the permanency of those varieties in later ages—that the four races into which Blumenbach and the best writers have agreed to divide the races of the old world are distinctly recorded and separated in like manner on some of the most ancient monuments of Egypt. On the tomb of Osirei, father of the Great Rameses, are represented the “dwellers upon earth as well those of Egypt as those of foreign countries.” Four figures are given in each group, and are coloured to represent the Tawny, the Yellow, the Black, and the White Races, respectively, with features corresponding to those of the same races in the present day. Such facts should teach us that the laws which regulate the generation and production of species and races are very different from those which regulate reproduction and succession, and that while we endeavour to explain the laws of origination by the laws of reproduction, we shall never arrive at the true solution of the origination of types.

It is no poetical fancy that Nature’s infancy was more active than its later years; that “Nature wantoned in her prime,” and produced more gigantic effects than now. Not that the powers of nature are weakened: but the purpose having been accomplished, its workings are stayed by the fiat of the Almighty God, and are employed in sustaining and reproducing, instead of generating anew and creating. When those powers are wanted again, they will spring into undecayed operation; let a new continent rise from the deep and the new world have to be people, and Nature will again resume the 124gigantic forces of its infancy, and become young to fill with life and activity a young world.

But at whatever period impressed, certain it is that many nations have a typical form of Nose, together with other peculiar distinctive features; and it concerns us now rather to regard the fact as it exists than to inquire how it happened.

The Roman, the Greek, and the Syrian forms of Nose have been already descanted upon, as forming three bases of our nomenclature. The present European nations are the Gothic, the Celtic, the Sclavonic, and the Finnish.

The Gothic has been subjected to so many varying circumstances that it is now perhaps impossible to assert, with confidence, its original natural form. Where a uniform dull system of despotism, political and religious, has for centuries bound down these nations in abject servitude, the Nose is sharp, devoid of Cogitativeness, and Romano-Greek in profile.

This is the case with the Spanish Goths and with those of France and Italy. These nations were so long held in mental thraldom that they ceased to cultivate cogitative powers which it was dangerous to use. Where espionage and Lettres de Cachet, the Inquisition and Monachism dog and punish men’s secret thoughts, and forbid the expression of any sentiment breathing a spirit opposed to the powers that be, or demonstrative of a disposition to inquire into the why and wherefore of political and religious dogmas, the mind, by an instinct of self-preservation, must cease to think. Where to think is a death-warrant, where a look of reflection or an aspect of discontent may be followed by the axe of the executioner, or the more fearful incarceration by the gaoler, the mind has no alternative but to forget itself and live in bestial oblivion, to “sit down to eat and drink and rise up to play.” With the cessation of the Cogitative powers, the Cogitativeness of the features will disappear, and the Nose will become defective in breadth, thin and sharp. To this want of reflection succeeds, in the naturally higher and more energetic nations, animal passion; and if ever the pressure is removed from the national mind and it obtain the upper hand of its keepers, 125fearful retribution and sanguinary revenge inevitably ensue. They who lived the animal life of a caged wild beast in apparent ease and quietude, well fed and perhaps, sensually, better provided for than if left to their native freedom, will, when let loose from confinement, fearfully vindicate the natural law of liberty, and with an insane instinct tear in pieces the keepers who have fed them for their own purposes and nurtured them for their own pleasure and profit, reckless of the natural social rights of man.

It is for this reason that the sharp, thin unthinking Nose appears symbolical likewise of cruelty; not so much because the natural disposition is cruel, as because the mind, when unchained, acts from animal impulse and not from sage reflection; and animal revenge is always wild and cruel.

We say this of nations which, like the Gothic and other Caucasian races, were originally well organized and endowed with higher capacities. This higher organization exhibits itself—whatever the degrees of Cogitativeness which incidental circumstances may have added, or adeemed—in a profile, Roman, or Greek, or compounded of both; and which may therefore be called nationally Romano-Greek. The profile not being so subject to variation from the pressure of external circumstances as the breadth, remains still pretty uniformly the same in all the Caucasian races in Europe, which might be written I
II. Other races there are which, either naturally of less penetrable stuff, and a lower and more obtuse organization, or longer ground down beneath a more crushing and uniform despotism, remain contented slaves and willing bondmen. This degradation, as we shall see when we come to speak of the Asiatic nations, appears also in their Noses.

France, Spain, and Italy have been depressed, not only beneath a political despotism till within a very recent period, but under the still more soul-crushing despotism of a gross superstition and corrupt religion—the latter even more than the former has repressed Cogitativeness in those nations. If there is one subject which more than 126another interests the human mind and occupies the thoughts, it is its religion—its eternal prospects—for Man is essentially a religious animal. Debarred from exercising thought upon its most natural and interesting topics—and all other subjects being dragged within the jealous circle of a religious despotism—so stern a barrier is opposed to thought that the mind rarely dare overleap it. While a political despotism may be well pleased to see its subjects occupied in scientific or metaphysical researches, in order to wean them from too critical an examination of itself, a religious despotism forbids any such researches unless made within the small circle it has prescribed. Death or imprisonment awaits a Galileo or a Copernicus, as it would under a similar rule, even now, await a Buckland or a Lyell.

At present, we lament that we can see nothing in the recent revolutionary movements in France and Italy, to indicate the existence of those Cogitative powers, the want of which has always hitherto checked their advancement towards true liberty and self-government.

Now, as in 1793, there seems “equally a want of books and men; without which, after a few years of bloodshed and anarchy, those countries must again submit to a despotic form of government. No country can be governed without intellect; and if that is not to be found in the many, the few who possess it must become the ruler.

This country has never long needed such a despotism. Germany, too, though hardly yet freed from a political despotism, has through a large portion of its area long thrown off the despotism of Rome, and embraced the more elevating and life-giving doctrines of the Reformation. In those provinces where this blessed change has taken place, Germany is starting rapidly into that career of intellectuality which England commenced three hundred years ago. The Germans and the English are preeminently deep-thinking nations; and in both of them is 127the Nose more decidedly and more generally of a Cogitative form than in any other Gothic nations.

The Cogitative may therefore, perhaps, be said to be one of the characteristic forms of the Noses of those Gothic branches, and might be expressed thus, (I + II)/III. Nevertheless, various degrees of education and various pursuits, with (in England) free institutions, have so diversified their features that they exhibit a much less uniform character than the features of most other nations.

The Anglo-Americans afford a further corroborative proof that the Cogitative Nose is dependent on the cultivation of a Cogitative mind. They present a striking contrast to their puritan forefathers,—men who abandoned home, country and friends for the sake of religious and political opinions; men to whom conscience was dearer than life, and freedom more precious than worldly advantage; men of the strictest integrity, the most scrupulous honesty, and the sternest firmness, sullied only by an excess of over-wrought feeling—fanaticism. All these virtues, and this vice (itself a virtue gone mad) are wanting to the American character. That there are happy exceptions, it is true; but a nation which boasts smartness as its most prominent virtue, must not complain if it is accused of want of principle. The circumstances of young America have contributed to render hers an unthinking people. The wild life to which so large a portion have been subjected, cut off from all neighbourhood, debarred from communication with cultivated minds, thrown entirely on the active business of the day for mental food, they have necessarily degenerated from the thinking men to whom they are indebted for their origin.

So far from the American Nose inheriting the Cogitative form of their ancestors’, it is thin and sharp; and, as a national nose, the most unthinking of any of the Gothic stock. America is, however, a fast-growing nation; it has had no infancy, but started at once into life, a full-grown youth. There is hope, therefore—of which already some assurance has been given—that it will yet furnish its quota of thinkers to the history of the human mind.

Strange as the assertion may appear, it is susceptible of 128many proofs, that the now degraded and dwindled Celts were originally the most powerful and widely dispersed people of the earth, boasting simultaneously a geographical extent and political importance, which have been achieved only by successive generations of the Gothic branches of the Indo-Germanic nations.

The Aborigines, Autochthones, Gigantes, Titanides (all which names signify earth-born), Atlantides, Cyclopeans, Pelasgi, Umbri, Etrusci and Sikeli, the Iotuns in Scandinavia, Pali in India, Kaous in Persia, Hycsos in Egypt, may all equally, by plausible and unanswerable facts, be surmised to have been Celts, with whom the immigrators of other races waged continual wars for possession of the earth. All the myths—so universal—of the wars of the gods and the giants, relate to wars between the invading conquerors and the primitive inhabitants, who are everywhere to be traced by their gigantic works of unhewn stone, cromlechs, stone circles, &c., not referable to any historic period, because the conquerors destroyed all records of their architects, and then, in idiotic wonder at their vast dimensions, referred them to gigantic first possessors of the earth.

Whether the original stature of the Celts was greater than that of the Gothic nations, may be doubted; but it is a curious fact that nearly all the modern European giants have been Celts, and immense stature was a common property of the wild Irish of former generations.

The existing Celtic races call for more extended observation. As an un-Gothicized nation, the Irish is the only remnant of a people which probably was at one time thinly spread over the whole of Europe. Nearly related to, if not originally identical with, the Goths, yet naturally of a less vigorous constitution and lower habit of mind, the Celts rapidly gave way before, or irretrievably amalgamated themselves with, their Pelasgian invaders in Greece and Italy, and their Gothic invaders in Trans-Alpine Europe.

Thus, at one time losing themselves in the overwhelming flood of their invaders, like the waters of a lake inundated by the sea; at another, retreating westerly before the oncoming torrent, the Celtic nations have gradually almost 129disappeared from continental Europe, and alone find a miserable home and wretched abiding-place on the most eastern shores of the Atlantic, and the most western corners of the Old World.

If the Atlantic could have afforded them a footing upon its turbulent waters, they would long since have been driven into it by their rapacious invaders. The complaint of the unhappy Celts has, ever since they were hunted to the extreme west of Europe, been the same, “Our enemies drive us into the sea; and the sea drives us back upon our enemies.”

Saxon ingenuity has, however, at last endeavoured to circumvent the sea. If it cannot receive into its bosom the last wreck of the Celts, it can carry them upon it to lands still further west, there to pine, and dwindle away and die; out of sight, and therefore out of the mind, of the haughty invader, who turns with well-feigned horror and disgust from the ruin and degradation which he has wrought.

To make room for himself, he expatriates the ancient owners of the soil, not only without remorse or compunction, but with much self-laudation and pharisaical pride that he has not extirpated them, and has not—only because he could not—adopted the ingenious idea of temporarily sinking an island to purify it for his own undisputed use and enjoyment.^[44]

130Naturally, however, the Celtic is not a low-class race. It may not have been originally so highly organized, or so mentally gifted as the Gothic; but in its infancy it had virtues which long thraldom has exterminated.

It is no fiction that Cæsar found the Gaulish and British youth more apt than the Goths at acquiring the arts and language of Rome, and that, in a few years, Roman civilization, more efficient than Saxon, had converted Britain into one of the most fertile and well-ordered provinces of the empire. It is no fiction that Rome found in Britain one of the most determined opposers of its claim to universal dominion, and that if it were to be

It is no fiction that after British Christianity had been driven by Saxon Paganism from Britain into Ireland, the Irish Celts furnished the best schools for literature, and the ablest scholars in Europe—and it is no fiction that ever since the Saxon has set foot in Ireland it has continued 131to droop and decay, until it is now a foul bog of iniquity; a wretched irreclaimable sink of inhuman vice and monstrous infamy.

Its Cogitativeness has been repressed till it cannot reflect nor appreciate any but physical modes of escape from thraldom. This is but the caged wild beast gnawing at its chain, and snapping at its keeper, whether his hand approaches to feed or to beat it.

It may be said, escape lies open to it in self-elevation, in moral rectitude, and industrious exertion; but it is too late for it to see and understand that. We might as well say to the broken leg, walk now, you walked once; or to the encaged madman, calm yourself and be free, you were calm and free once.

We need no better proof of the non-cogitativeness of Ireland than the facile manner in which it throws itself beneath the Juggernautic car of every demagogue, and sacrifices itself to his avaricious cruelty. We need no better proof of the truth of our theory, than that the Nose of the same nation is deficient in Cogitativeness, and is for 132the most part thin and sharp. It has not, however, lost the Romano-Greek profile, usual among the Caucasian races.

This is true in the main; but unhappily more recent information compels us to modify it, and add another proof of Nasology from degradation of physical structure simultaneously with mental degradation. “There are certain districts in Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo” (as pointed out by an intelligent writer in the Dublin University Magazine, No. 48), chiefly inhabited by descendants of the native Irish driven by the British from Armagh and the south of Down, about two centuries ago. These people, whose ancestors were well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, are now reduced to an average stature of five feet two inches, are pot-bellied, bow-legged, and abortively featured, and are especially remarkable for “open projecting mouths, with prominent teeth, and exposed gums, (i. e. prognathous-jawed—the Negro type), their advancing cheekbones, and depressed noses, bearing barbarism on their very front.” In other words, within so short a period, they seem to have acquired a prognathous type of skull, like the savages of Australia, “thus giving such an example of deterioration from known causes, as almost compensates by its value to future ages, for the sufferings and debasement which past generations have endured in perfecting its appalling lesson.”^[46]

The study of the British Legislature should be “How to get” Ireland a Cogitative Nose; not by any surgical process, such as that of the

for phlebotomizing is the worst mode of legislation—but by cultivating in her people a Cogitative mind; well assured that whether or not the attempt succeed in developing their probosces, it will be well repaid by other and more important improvements in their condition. How this is to be effected would afford matter for an interesting essay; but it would be out of place here, though we have 133our nostrums on the subject like every other political doctor, and cannot resist saying that it will never be done by “Constitutional” Legislation, which is only fitted for the Teutonic races. The Irish, like the cognate race, the French, must be governed by an enlightened despotism; they must be gently pushed on by their leaders to their own good, while the Teutonic races may be safely left to push on their leaders—treading, not always too gently, on their heels, by way of hint to get on. It is a most fatal error in legislation to disregard the psychonomic differences in races, and under a philanthropic pretence of the natural equality of man, to endeavour to govern all by the same laws and institutions.

It was the sad misfortune of Ireland to be conquered after the downfall of the feudal system, and to be at once inducted—with sanguinary and therefore ineffective restrictions on their use—into free forms of government. The feudal system, in its original integrity—without its on-grafted abuses, as fines, heriots, &c. &c.—is almost the only system on which a naturally high-class but barbarous race can be held down, while they are being elevated in the scale of humanity; and if for three or four generations Ireland could be subjected to pure and beneficent feudality—whereby every man would be linked to a superior, and be compelled to exert himself to retain his feud—together with the Alfredic tithing-man system—to prevent or detect and punish crime—it might be gradually placed on such an equality with England, as to enable it to be safely governed on the same constitutional principles. Perhaps, however, it is rather to be wished that this had been done in past times, than to attempt it now: it might be dangerous to the liberties of England to retrograde; for it must be admitted that a return to feudality is retrogression, and the state of external peace to which it would bring Ireland might afford an argument to future English Legislatures, to tie down the turbulent liberties of England with the same bonds—which God forbid! better live in a storm than rot in a calm.

It is the unhappy fate of Ireland that its evils are past remedy. Her woes are the executioners of God’s judgments against England for the latter’s crimes towards her. 134Ireland suffers that she may be a sharp thorn in the side—perhaps a dagger in the heart—of England. No nation sins without retribution from the quarter against which the crime has been committed, and much more evil must England suffer from Ireland ere an equivalent punishment has been inflicted. Nevertheless Ireland is not wretched only because England must suffer; she is wretched for her own crimes, and her wretchedness is over-ruled to be the punishment of her oppressor likewise.

This is by no means an isolated instance of the duality of purposes in the Divine judgments. The crimes of a nation have ofttimes been made the punishment of itself and another; so likewise, among individuals, the visitation of one man’s sins frequently extends to punish the faults, or try the virtue, of his friends and relations.

The ambitious pride of Babylon punished the idolatry of the Israelites, but at the same time brought down ruin on itself. The conquest of America punished the gross vices and savage idolatries of the natives, and at the same time retributed the cruelties and crimes of their punishers by inundating Spain with the gold and silver which has wrought her present degradation. May we not add that England’s punishment of the revolutionary crimes of France, is now retributing her own commercial jealousy, and wild interference in Continental politics, by clogging her with debt, and raising a host of European rivals to her claim for universal commerce.

The lowest organized race of any consequence in Europe is the Sclavonic.

The Sclavones came into contact with Roman civilization earlier than the Goths; but, unlike the latter, they retired to their settlements without carrying away any portion of the manners and habits of the people whom they invaded. Even yet they are but little advanced, since that early epoch. At least till within the present century, the Russian noble, as well as his serf, led the life of a pig, eating, and drinking, and sleeping. Wallowing in filth, insensate with brandy, and degraded by lust, the Russians of various ranks differ only in the size and splendour of their respective styes. To enter with minuteness into the daily habits of all classes of both sexes would be to present 135a picture which we should revolt from drawing, and the reader from beholding.

The Snubbo-Celestial form of the Sclavonic Nose stamps its character irretrievably, and accords remarkably with the description of the Sclavonic mind given by Kohl and other recent writers:—“Inconsistent and unstable—wanting in the creative faculty; but we cannot deny them a marvellous aptitude for all kinds of work, and an extreme facility of imitation.”^[47] This is just the description a farmer might give of his horse, or a fine lady of her monkey. “The hope of Europe,” says the same author, “from Russian power consists in its total want of vigorous characters, mighty minds, and moral energy.” The pictures which the lively writer Kohl gives of the Russians—their ‘small shrewdness and fox-like common sense,’ their impudent acknowledgment of their shameless cheating and pedlaring dishonesty—accord literally with the indications which we have ascribed to the Celestial Nose; but we must refer the reader to his work on Russia for endless confirmations of our assertion.

Russia may rise above its present animal degradation, but it will never take a high place in the history of civilization. It may be doubted whether it will ever take any station there at all, except when in some future and long distant age, it is recorded, that, like Asia and Africa, Europe fell from its palmy state, and became a heap of ruins before the furious desolation of barbarous swarms from the north.

Napoleon said, with the prophetic vision of old experience, for

that in fifty years Europe would be Republican or Cossack. He only erred in using the disjunctive; for it does not require much penetration to foresee that, at no very distant period, Europe will be both—first Republican, and then, when thus prostrated at the foot of the first powerful despot—Cossack.

For this purpose, it is probable the Sclavonian nations, 136with hordes of Mongolian Calmucks, and Tartars—the σιμοὶ, or flat-nosed nations of Herodotus—are gathering force and increasing in their vast plains and desolate forests. The scourge of Europe—once the scourge of Asia—is being prepared slowly but surely; and when civilization shall have taken a firm hold of America and the new continents gradually being built up in the Pacific, Europe, having fulfilled its part in the world’s history, will be swept away, and become a byword and a scorn among the nations—‘Ichabod’ will be written on its temples, and the bittern and the owl shall inhabit it; the wild beast of the desert shall lie there, and the dragons in its pleasant palaces.

The Finnish race presents a remarkable proof of the variation in physiognomy attendant on variation in mental capacity, occasioned by change of circumstances—as government, climate, and habits. The ancient Huns, the modern Hungarians, and the northern Finns and Lapps of the shores of the Bothnian Gulf and the White Sea, are all of the same race; and yet differ widely from each other in physiognomy and psychonomy.

“Few races exhibit greater or more remarkable differences in mental cultivation, and in the direction of their passions, according as they have been determined by the degeneration of servitude, warlike ferocity, or a continual striving for political freedom, than the Finns. In evidence of this we need only refer to the now peaceful Finns of the north, to the Huns, once celebrated for conquests that disturbed the then existing order of things, and lastly, to a great and noble people—the Magyars.”^[48]

The differences between those races took place within the historic period, and afford a striking instance of the effect of external circumstances in modifying the mental and corporeal features.

The fierce and savage Huns, who overran a portion of the Roman Empire under Attila in the fifth century, differed wholly from the Finns now existing in Europe. So misshapen were their features, and so hideous their aspect, so savage and demoniacal their warfare, that the terrified Goths could not believe them to be born of 137woman, but asserted them to be the unnatural offspring of demons and witches in the fearful solitudes of the icy north. One of their distinctive features was a flat depressed nose, plainly indicating their low organization.

Although the Finns and Lapps retain the flat nose—never having emerged from barbarism—they are a mild, gentle, meek-spirited race, presenting few features which seem capable of amelioration.

The Hungarians, on the other hand—in whom, however, we must suspect a large infusion of Gothic blood—are a bold, independent, noble-minded, and highly intellectual people; characteristics which exhibit themselves in a noble Roman Nose, and a countenance bespeaking the independence of their minds.

We may next advert to the characteristic features of a few of the Asiatic nations.

Perhaps no nation displays a more universal dead level and general sameness of feature than the Snub-nosed Chinese. Notwithstanding the great varieties in climate and soil which prevail in that extensive Empire, and the correspondent variations which must be made in domestic habits and style of living, a remarkable identity of feature prevails among all classes of every province. The faces may be said to be all cast in the same mould; and one could wish that Nature, when she made the first cast, had—as she is reported to have done when she made a certain beautiful female, whose name we forget—broken the mould before she produced any more casts from it. Perhaps, however, we belie the good old dame in attributing the production of this, or any other equally ugly countenance, to her. It is rather the degraded form into which a despotism of unknown duration and unexampled soul-depressive powers has converted the original type.

A form of government more admirably arranged to keep the people in a state of childhood has never been modelled than that of China. The wisdom of its arrangements for securing the permanent despotism of the ruler is undeniably proved by its long and peaceable subsistence. To rebel in China is the heinous crime of filial disobedience: it is not, as in Europe, a political crime merely, it is also a moral crime of the same class as murder or theft. Unless we can imagine a nation by universal 138assent throwing off the bonds of morality, and living in confessedly gross crime, we can form no conception of the Chinese rebelling. It would present the unnatural and inconceivable state of a nation of parricides and disobedient children.

Every superior in China, from the Emperor to the military officer or civil Mandarin, is “a father;” all under him are his “children,” and as such must obey him without question or demur. “Filial disobedience,” whether to parents or governors, is the highest crime. Filial disobedience is thus defined:—“In our general conduct not to be orderly, is to fail in filial duty; in a Magistrate not to be faithful, is to fail in filial duty: among friends, not to be sincere, is to fail in filial duty: in arms and war, not to be brave, is to fail in filial duty.” A people thus treated as children, must ever remain in a state of childhood; and though education is general among the Chinese, it is an education which, like the bandages on their women’s feet, binds their minds from growing, and restricts them to the size and calibre of infancy.

Education in China consists solely in social and political training for the purposes of despotism. The studies are confined to one unvaried routine, and no deviation from the prescribed track is permitted. Within this circle all are, and must be, educated. Hence an uniformity of mind prevails, and has prevailed for ages throughout China, and has extended itself to the national features; betraying itself in Snub Noses and a dull, stolid expression of countenance. So much for compulsory education! It is impossible that it should be otherwise.

A nation whose minds are all reduced to the same level; whose thoughts are prescribed; whose daily conduct is measured out; whose very amusements are dictated by an imperial will, must necessarily soon become uniform, both mentally and physically. This uniformity will be the waveless level of the Dead Sea. Storms may agitate the upper sky, winds may rage, and floods descend; but the waves are too heavy to rise from their death-like repose. They sleep the calm sleep, not of peace, but of death. The last trumpet alone can arouse their torpor. The benignant mind of the Christian may nourish sweet hopes of evangelizing a nation so sunk. 139but the hopes are vain. Christianity came not till the human mind was fitted and prepared to receive and understand its divine precepts. It came not to the infancy of the world, but to its old age and matured judgment. A nation, therefore, steeped in the irreclaimable dotage of a childhood which has endured throughout its whole life, cannot receive it. Both the Hindoos and the Chinese have forfeited by their long-lived puerility the blessed message.

The first and every subsequent step of Christianity, as of civilization, has been Westward. Neither can they ever return to the East. The Apostle of the Gentiles preached from Judea to Pamphylia and Galatia, but was forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the Word in Asia;^[49] and when he assayed to go Eastward into Bithynia, the spirit suffered him not, but compelled him westerly into Macedonia. From Macedonia to Rome; from Rome to Gaul; from Gaul to Britain; from Britain to America and Polynesia, the course has still ever been uniformly westward.^[50] A few isolated Christians may be made in Asia; but it will never be Christianized. Asia has performed its part on the world’s stage. It is dead out, and cannot be resuscitated. When Christianity is entertained by “all nations,” Asia will be no more. It will not be reckonable among the nations, even as a dead man is not among the living. This may seem a harsh judgment. But is it harsher that nations whose own degradation unfits them for Christianity, shall remain ignorant of it during the brief remainder of the world, than that they have been ignorant of it for nearly two thousand years?

It is not for man to judge God, and to say that his ways are unjust. We must not deny the fact because we cannot comprehend it. We cannot tell by what crimes Asia has forfeited her part in the New Covenant of Grace. It may be because she rejected the first dispensation, and flagrantly violated the Old Covenant of Works. To Asia, the mother of mankind, the blissful seat of our first parents, the nurse of the renovated human race, were given the first pure, simple precepts by which Man was taught to obey his God as a child obeys his parent. How 140soon she flung off this obedience and rejected her Great Teacher let history, both sacred and profane, attest. Long ere Asia sent forth peoples and nations to replenish other quarters of the earth, these original precepts had been obscured and obliterated by idolatry and polytheism. A lesser crime, therefore, attached to these mis-instructed offsprings than to the misteaching mother. A second dispensation was therefore revealed to them, but forbidden to her. So far man might think he comprehended the divine purposes without impugning God’s wisdom and justice; yet he may err, and his frail musings be but the cogitations of the flea which reasons on the movements of the elephant, whose back is his universe. This should be the humble reflection of all who strive to justify the ways of God to man. We know but in part, and we see but in part, and therefore cannot judge of Him who sees and knows the whole.

We have incidentally mentioned the Hindoos as partaking in the mental degradation of the Chinese. But, nevertheless, they are not nearly so degraded a race, nor have they so general an uniformity in their features, nor so low a formation of their Noses. India has been subjected to less uniformity of despotism than China. While to the dominant system of the latter we can assign no limit, we find in that of the former numerous epochs when important changes have taken place.

Fierce religious wars, frequent foreign invasions, domestic feuds and intestine warfare have kept the Hindoo mind more on the alert than that of China. Assyria, Egypt, Scythia, Greece, Persia, and Britain have at different epochs overwhelmed India. Idolatrous Monotheism, Polytheism, Mahometanism and Christianity have, in turn, violated its shrines, and endeavoured to overwhelm both Buddha and Brahma. Buddha and Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, have striven to overthrow each other; but while the country has been desolated, the people have been saved from sinking into the uniform degradation of the Chinese. Nevertheless, under each and every system, despotism has prevailed in India; no free institution has ever flourished on its plains; and, therefore, despite the stirring events which have excited it, it has never risen again to that 141high station which its people must have held among their contemporaries when they sculptured the caves of Elephanta and Ellora, and raised the pyramidal pagodas of Tanjore and Deogur.

These gigantic works sufficiently attest that the inhabitants of India are not naturally of a low-class race. Forty thousand men labouring incessantly for forty years would hardly suffice to excavate and sculpture the cavern-temples of Salsette alone. Yet those form but a small portion of similar gigantic works of the same age.

No mean-minded men raised fanes such as these to the Deity. Energy of the most vigorous character, talent of the highest rank, and devotion of the noblest nature, could alone have dictated and executed structures which outvie in magnitude the boldest efforts of modern genius. In comparing them with the latter, we should moreover recollect that they were the first efforts of the human race; made without pattern, designed without exemplar, and commenced and carried out without experience.

How different must those men have been from the soft and effeminate Hindoo who has forgotten in the mist of ages these shrines of his fathers, and abandoned them to ruin and decay; and who, conscious of his own utter inability to achieve or conceive their equals, ascribes their formation to giants and demigods. And they were different. The same race, but different men, different in features as in minds. While the profile of the modern Hindoo is soft and effeminate, and the Nose short and rounded (parabolic), the ancient sculptures demonstrate that the profile of their earliest progenitors was manly and decided, and identical with that of their descendants, the Indo-Germanic nations, in Europe. One well-known instance will suffice. The Trimurti or three-headed deity in the caves of Elephanta.

This is a sculpture of the most remote antiquity, but the dress, the beads, the sacred cord and other religious symbols declare it to be the work of Hindoos. In anthropomorphising the Deity, men always adopt their own typical countenance for that of their God. Hence their idols betray the national features. Now, observe the profiles of Vishnu and Siva in this Trimurti. The face of the former, 142the good and beneficent “Preserver,” the friend and mediator for man, is a purely Greek face; the Nose straight and well-defined. It has none of the air of the modern Hindoo countenance. Much less has that of the energetic and terrible Siva, “the Destroyer.” The Nose is of the most energetic form; it is a fine Roman Nose, aquiline and rugose. If phrenologists are permitted from similar facts to say that the Greeks—who were but children to these Hindoo artists—were phrenologists, surely we may venture to say that even at this very early period the Hindoos were Nasologists.

But in the wide nostril of Brahma we also perceive the Cogitative form of Nose, so necessary to indicate the wisdom of Brahma, “the Creator:” who, though now he rests, having consigned the inferior office of Preservation to Vishnu, was the first emanation from the supreme Brahmè, and by whom and from whom all creation proceeded. With the exception of the head in this Trimurti, Brahma has no idolatrous representations, for it is said in the Vedas, “Of Him whose glory is so great, there is no image. He is the incomprehensible Being which illumines all, delights all, and whence all proceed.”

Sir William Jones mentions, in one of his discourses published in the Asiatic Researches, the existence of a small nation in India which appears distinct from the 143Hindoo race. The people comprising it he describes as shrewd, clever tradesmen, enterprising merchants, acute money-lenders, and notorious in India for their aptitude for commerce. Their countenances, he adds, are what are called Jewish, and hence he concludes that they constitute a portion of Jews, who either at the dispersion of the Ten Tribes, or at some other very early period, settled in India. It is surprising that the acute President should have so hastily jumped to such a conclusion from the foregoing premises; for he adds a fact which seems most decidedly to negative it. This people, he tells us, have not the slightest trace of any Jewish traditions, belief, or customs among them. Now it is a familiar fact that the Jews, wherever dispersed, or however long separated from their brethren, have invariably retained a very large proportion of the inspired precepts revealed to regulate their religious, moral, and social conduct; and it must demand the most precise and indisputable evidence to justify the classing any people as Jews, who have lost all traces of the manners and customs of that singular nation.

For these reasons we do not hesitate to say that the two facts on which Sir W. Jones founded his hasty hypothesis, viz. the commercial character and the Jewish physiognomy of this Asiatic tribe, afford by their coincidence only a remarkable and curious confirmation of our Nasological theory, and as such, we here gladly insert it.

We have said that the Jewish Nose should more properly be called the Syrian Nose; but have reserved, until this place, some of the corroborative illustrations.

The Syrian Arabs, as descendants of Abraham, through the wild son of Hagar, inherit the physical, and many of the metaphysical, features of the Hebrew nation.

Destined, by the promise of God, to become a great nation, the Arabs founded one of the most extensive kingdoms of the earth, and for many centuries swayed an empire more extensive than that of Rome in her fullest prosperity. For twelve hundred years, a larger proportion of the inhabitants of the earth have devoutly obeyed the precepts of the Arabian prophet, than have knelt at the altar of any other individual creed; and, though Mahometanism is perhaps doomed to fall before Christianity, it 144cannot be regarded in any other light than as a minor dispensation, and an inferior blessing conferred by Providence on a very large proportion of His people.

Christians who yet recognize the finger of God in every sublunary affair, would shrink with horror if asked to recognize in Mahometanism a Providential dispensation; yet, whether we regard it as a religion which annihilated the grossest idolatries, abolished human sacrifices, exterminated the vilest obscenities, and substituted a nearly spiritual worship of One God, over the largest and fairest portion of the earth,—or as the religion of a nation, whose ancestor God blessed, and promised to “make a great nation,” and “to multiply exceedingly, that it should not be numbered for multitude;” and who, in token thereof, received the seal of circumcision—to this day retained, as among the Jews—it is difficult not to see in it the finger of God, or to deny that the pseudo-prophet of the sons of Ishmael was an unconscious instrument for good in His hands.

But this is a topic not needful for us here to enter fully upon. It is more to our purpose to remark upon the psychonomic features of the Arabs, while in the zenith of their promised glory as a nation;^[51] when the Caliphs of the East ruled as Priest and Potentate over more than two-thirds of the known globe.

During this glorious period of their power, the Arab character shone out uncontrolled in its true features, and exhibited itself as it had never done before, nor since.

True to its parentage, but unshackled by the stringent laws and anti-social ceremonies of its more favoured brother, it rioted in all those tastes and pursuits which the latter delighted in, but was restrained from; and became celebrated for a splendour which was rivalled by that of Solomon alone, and a traffic which far outvied that of all 145contemporaries or predecessors—except, perhaps, the cognate nation—the Phœnicians.

Rich in barbaric pearls and gold, and boasting all the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, the court of the Caliphs verified the visions of the “Arabian Nights;” which, if true, were true here only. All the gauds and trinkets, the golden palaces, the jewelled walls, the glittering roofs, in which the other branch^[52] of the Hebrew nation displayed their highest ideas of magnificence, shone resplendent in the halls of the Caliphs.

But as to the boasted literature of the Arabs, it resolves itself into an ardent pursuit of physical science—astronomy, chemistry, and the mechanical arts, for nearly all the more important of which we are indebted to the Arabs; not, however, as inventors, but as carriers, like the Phœnicians. In the higher departments of literature, the Arabs made no progress. Metaphysical disquisitions and intellectual pursuits were repugnant to their tastes, which rather delighted in the physics of Aristotle than the metaphysics of Plato.

Nor were they less true to their nasal development in their success and skill in commercial pursuits. The commerce of Arabia, for several centuries, encircled the whole known world. From the frigid shores of Scandinavia, from the torrid sands of Africa, from silken Cathay, from jewelled Ceylon, from vine-clad Europe, from spicy Araby, flowed the rich streams of produce. The amber of the north was exchanged for the gold of the south; the wines of Spain for the silks of China; the pearls of Ceylon for the slaves and gold-dust of Africa; and a commerce now excelled only by that of England, carried arts and literature from one end of the Old World to the other, and was mainly instrumental in raising the more highly-organized nations of Europe from barbarism to a physical and intellectual splendour hitherto unknown.

But from this glorious reality, the Arab has sunk into a wretched, irretrievable lethargy. Like the Jew, he has been weighed in the balance and found wanting; the cup 146of promise has been held to his lips, and he has refused, or polluted the blessed draught. They have been called, but would not come, they would have been gathered together as tender chickens under the wings of the hen, but they would not; and “behold, their house is left unto them desolate.”

Neither Arab nor Jew shall ever again revive, till they join with the whole earth in one universal cry, “Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord!”

It has been said that Christian intolerance has driven the Jew into the mart, and sunk his soul in barter. But this is not true—Commerce and money-getting are the psychonomic features of both the Hebrew races. The Israelitish branch is vehemently charged with its usury and extortion, by all its prophets. The severe laws which Moses made against usury shew the character of the people for whom they were necessary; yet those laws were ineffectual to check this inherent vice. Ezekiel (ch. xxii. 12) exclaims, “Thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God;” so all the prophets.

The Arab and the Jew are both now equally sunk in the same degradation, (Heu! quantum mutati!) and both exhibit, through this degradation, their love of gold, though in a different manner. The Arab still haunting his native soil, from which legitimate commerce is almost excluded, betrays his ruling passion in extortion from travellers, in skilful chicanery in horse-dealing—the only commerce left to him—or in impudent incessant demands on strangers for bacsheesh.

All travellers agree, that when the Arab, degraded as he is, has an opportunity, there is no shrewder or more skilful bargain-maker, nor any one more competent to extract by ingenious chaffering, the full equivalent for his services. He has been designated by fleeced and angry travellers—little thinking how near the mark they were—the Jew of the desert. The modern Jew, driven from the land of his birth into a wider sphere, exercises his commercial propensities in similar pursuits, and under every clime; and amidst every race, out-manœuvres and surpasses his less shrewd antagonist.

147Other Asiatic nations might seem to call for observation; but so little is known of their mental characteristics, that it would be improper to endeavour to substantiate our cause by them.

It is unnecessary to do more than remind the reader of the low development of the Negro mind and his miserable nasal conformation—they are worthy of each other. However humane may be the attempts to elevate the Negro, it can never be done till his Nose is more elongated; but as its present form has subsisted without alteration for three or four thousand years, there does not seem much hope of its being improved now. The Negro race, as old as the earliest Egyptian sculptures, has never risen to an equality with any of the other races; and, though we would not willingly condemn any nation to hopeless degradation, yet the history of the Past will reveal somewhat of the secrets of the Future, and he is a fool who cannot, and a coward who dare not, read them.

As among individuals, so among nations there are orders and degrees of mind, and it is only the blind who cannot see that the equality of the one is as wild a dream as the equality of the other.

No well-informed writer, however warm his sympathies towards the Negro race as his relation by the same “blood of which God made all the dwellers upon earth,” has anticipated a destiny for it equal to that of the Caucasian or elliptical-headed and aquiline-nosed races. Channing, the most enthusiastic friend of the blacks, in all the fervour of his ardent mind and vivid imagination, attributes to them a capacity only for the milder graces of Christianity, and accords to them a destiny precisely such as is indicated by their nasal formation when elevated and sanctified by religion. “I should expect,” he says, “from the African race, if civilized, less energy, less courage, less intellectual originality, than in ours; but more amiableness, tranquillity, gentleness, and content. They might not rise to an equality in outward condition, but would probably be a much happier race.” Essentially a feminine character is that which he assigns the negro; a character very loveable, notwithstanding the deformity of its facial indicator.

In the new Islands of the Pacific, we behold a constant 148succession of new worlds emerging from the deep by means of the same process which, in the pre-Adamite world, formed and elevated the islands and continents of the northern hemisphere. Minute polypi are secreting from the waters, and fixing on the summits of submarine volcanoes the solid and durable limestone which now forms their protection from the waves, and which will hereafter form the foundations on which accumulated detritus will heap up fertile soils and habitable lands.^[53] Earthquakes are continually pushing up these horizontal surfaces, and breaking them up into mountains which, arresting the clouds in their progress, draw down into the valleys and plains the fertilizing rain. This smooths down the asperities of the earthquake-broken surface, and softens and harmonizes into that sweet variety which gives birth to

To people these new lands, Nature has branched off from the old stock, new races of men of various degrees of physical development and mental endowments. While those nearest the old continent of Asia, and therefore nearest to the old blood, are of the lowest possible mental and physical organization, little elevated above the low-class animals—the kangaroo and the ornithorynchus^[54]—of the Australian plains, those at a greater distance—the New Zealander and the Otaheitan—exhibit a development which may vie with that of the Caucasian nations: and which has proved its equality by not sinking before them, 149but maintaining against Saxon invaders equal rights and equal privileges.

We have a striking instance of this before us at the present time. The British Legislature having, in ignorance of the determined character and clever good sense of the New Zealanders, endeavoured to force upon them a Constitution which deprived them of legislative privileges equal with those of the colonists, and which gave to the latter the power of taxing the former without their consent, the natives have resisted the injustice so firmly, but hitherto peaceably, that the Governor, Sir George Grey, has been compelled to suspend this so-called Constitution, lest it should foment a war of the most deadly character. It is worthy of observation that the injustice attempted to be done this shrewd and spirited people, is not one of an evident physical character, such as any savage can appreciate, but one of a purely theoretical and political nature, the importance of which is even yet hardly sufficiently understood and appreciated in any country besides England. Sir George Grey writes to the Home Government as follows:

“By the introduction of the proposed Constitution into the provinces of New Zealand, her Majesty’s Ministers would not confer, as it was intended, upon her subjects the blessings of self-government, but would be giving power to a small minority (the colonists). She would not be giving to her subjects the right to manage their affairs as they might think proper, but would be giving to a small minority a power to raise taxes from the great majority (the aborigines). There was no reason to think that the majority of the aboriginal inhabitants would be satisfied with the rule of the minority; while there are many reasons for believing that they would resist to the uttermost. They were people of strong natural sense and ability, but by nature jealous and suspicious. Many of them were owners 150of vessels, horses, and cattle, and had considerable sums of money at their disposal, and there was no people he was acquainted with less likely to sit down quietly under what they might regard as an injustice.”

“For these and other reasons, the Governor announced that he should not proclaim the constitution before receiving fresh instructions from the Colonial Office.

“The tone of the most trustworthy correspondence from New Zealand, proves that this exercise of independent authority on the part of Governor Grey has saved the colony from disastrous consequences. Ministers acknowledge his superior competency to judge in a matter of this kind, and a bill has accordingly been introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Labouchere, ‘for suspending, during a limited time (viz., for five years), the operation of part of the Act for making further provision for the government of the New Zealand Islands.’”^[55]

Thus has this noble people, with a strong natural sense and ability not hitherto supposed to belong innately to “savages,” opposed more successfully the first step in tyranny—the power of unrepresented taxation—than any other nation (except the Saxon), which has ever existed, civilized or uncivilized.

This has been done within twenty years after their actual beneficial contact with civilization; but it was more than six hundred years after the Norman conquest, before the Saxon roused himself to enforce the same right of self-taxation. There could be but one better evidence than this of the high-class mind of this people; and it has furnished this one better, and best, evidence—its speedy and conscientious reception of Christianity; for “in no country, similarly circumstanced, has the Gospel made such rapid progress, since the days of the Apostles.”^[56]

While for several centuries missionaries of every denomination have laboured in Asia in vain, no sooner was Christianity efficiently made known to the New Zealanders, than, catching at once with a remarkable aptitude its leading characteristics, and appreciating immediately its beneficent doctrines, they accepted it; and now, together 151with other Polynesian islands, New Zealand affords the proudest conquest and the richest harvest of the soldier of Christ.

Yet, apparently, for no nation could Christianity be less adapted, and no nation could be expected to afford less hope of speedy conversion. The pagan New Zealander was a fierce, blood-thirsty monster, spending his whole life, and finding all his pleasures, in the most savage warfare. Not content with slaying his enemies in combat, he sat down afterwards, with a joyous enthusiasm worthy of a fiend, to make a feast on their carcasses. Human sacrifices stained his altars, and hideously deformed images pourtrayed his debased notions of a God.

On the other hand, the peaceable and mild Hindoos, whose religion forbids bloody sacrifices of any kind, and enjoins the careful preservation of the spirit of life, even in the meanest forms; whose singular traditions of the incarnate Chreeshna seem to point distinctly to a Messiah, and whose remarkable Trimurti, “three in one, and one in three,” seems to open a way to the facile reception of the mysterious doctrine of a Trinity in Unity, have never, as a nation, a province, or even a small village, embraced Christianity.^[57] China, which has its similar traditions, whose sages have taught that “The true Holy One is to be found in the West,” and that “Eternal reason (λόγος) produced One, One produced Two, Two produced Three, and Three produced all things,” and whose calm stoicism and severe morality are so accordant with the external symptoms of a Christian mind, has hardly furnished a single convert, and apparently feels no curiosity about the religion of the Fanqui (white devils).

If history is the past teaching lessons to the future, surely our Missionary Societies might take a lesson from these facts, and withdraw their exertions from so hopeless 152a field as Asia, and expend them on the hopeful soil of Polynesia. Surely if the great Apostle of the Gentiles, who was specially appointed to bring into the fold of Christ “all nations,” was forbidden to preach the Word to the effete nations of Asia, it is not given to his successors to contravene the inspired mandate.

Other injunctions of Scripture to the apostolic Church are rightly interpreted as applicable, and to be obeyed by the Church in all future ages; and it is a strange inconsistency, arising from a too warm and enthusiastic desire to promote the kingdom of Christ, fruitlessly to strive, in this instance, against the mandate of the Holy Spirit.

Thus much have we said, to contrast the New Zealand mind with the Hindoo and the Chinese, because the same contrast is manifest in their respective physiognomies.

Compare the bold energetic Roman Nose, the manly and commanding profile of the New Zealander, with the soft and rounded features of the Hindoo, and the flat monotonous surface of the Chinese visage. You perceive at a glance that the first is the face of a man of strong, straight-forward, common sense, and intense energy. He may not be an acute and subtle reasoner; but he catches at once the leading points of a subject, instantly decides, and instantly acts upon his decision.

153While the two latter remain in imperturbable absorption, and while the subtle “Greek” would be thinking too precisely on the event,

the “Roman” has been, and seen, and conquered. He is come back, at home, resting after his successful toil; while the “Snub” is thinking about getting out of bed, and the “Greek” is making up his mind whether it is “worth while” to go out.

Thus we have, from divers sources, brought together, briefly and succinctly, a few of the universal proofs which establish Nasology as a science. From individuals and from nations we have gathered the basis of our nasological laws; and we trust we have produced conviction in some minds that “the Nose is an index to Character;” if not, we shall not say to the reader, as phrenologists do to their incredulous auditors, that it arises from his defective organization, but rather attribute it to our own defective mode of argumentation; for we shall not willingly admit the erroneousness of a system which has been built up upon many years of personal observation both among the dead and among the living.

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