Nay, we may go further.  The mental emotions excited by those sensations will be expressed in the same way.  For example, the sense of smell is peculiarly effective in exciting disgust.  Anything which does violence to the sense of hearing exasperates, but does not disgust.  If a man practises the accordion all day in the next room you do not loathe him, you only want to kill him.  But anything that stinks excites pure disgust.  Here you have the key to the fact that disgust and all feelings akin to it, disdain, contempt and scorn, express themselves through the nose.  Darwin says that when we think of anything base or vile in a man’s character the expression of the face is the same “as if we smelled a bad smell.”  This is an example of the temporary expression of a passing emotion, and there are many others like it.  But each of us has his prevailing and dominant emotions which constitute the habitual attitude of his mind.  And by the habitual indulgence of any emotion the features will become habituated to the expression of it, and so the set of our features comes at last to express our prevailing and dominant emotions; in other words, our character.

[Illustration:  THE NOSTRILS OF THE APTERYX ARE AT THE TIP OF ITS BEAK.]

But let us return to the evolution of the nose.  In these days of universal “Nature study” nobody need be told that the practice of breathing through the nostrils was introduced by the amphibians and reptiles.  The former (frogs and toads) take to it only when they come of age, but lizards, snakes and all other reptiles do it from infancy.  But the nose is not yet.  That is something too delicate to come out of a cold-blooded snout covered with hard scales.  Birds, too, by having their mouth parts encased in a horny bill seem to be debarred from wearing noses.  And yet there is one primeval fowl, most ancient of all the feathered families, which has come near it.  I mean the apteryx, that eccentric, wingless recluse which hides itself in the scrub jungles of New Zealand.  Its nostrils, unlike those of every other bird, are at the tip of its beak, which is swollen and sensitive; and Dr. Buller says that as it wanders about in the night it makes a continual sniffing and softly taps the walls of its cage with the point of its bill.  But the apteryx is one of those odd geniuses which come into the world too soon, and perish ineffectual.  Its kindred are all extinct, and so will it be ere long.

[Illustration:  A BOLD ATTEMPT TO GROW IN THE CASE OF A TAPIR]

When we come to the beasts we find the right conditions at last for the growth of the nose.  Take the horse for an example of the average beast without idiosyncrasy.  Its profile is nearly a straight line from the crown to the nostrils, beyond which it slopes downwards to the lips.  The skin of this part is soft and smooth, without hair, and the horse dearly loves to have it fondled.  The sense of touch is evidently uppermost.  At this stage