on the back like snow, on the palm like ivory, are exactly the length of the face; the full and rounded fingers are long and terminating in round, curved nails of soft color.  The chest as a whole has the form of a pear, reversed, but a little compressed, and the base attached to the neck in a delightfully well-proportioned manner.  The belly, the flanks, and the secret parts are worthy of the chest; the hips are large and rounded; the thighs, the legs, and the arms are in just proportion.  The breadth of the shoulders is also in the most perfect relation to the dimensions of the other parts of the body; the feet, of medium length, terminate in beautifully arranged toes.” (Houdoy reproduces this passage in La Beaute des Femmes; cf. also Stratz, Die Schoenheit des Weiblichen Koerpers, Chapter III.)

Gabriel de Minut, who published in 1587 a treatise of no very great importance, De la Beaute, also wrote under the title of La Paulegraphie a very elaborate description, covering sixty pages, of Paule de Viguier, a Gascon lady of good family and virtuous life living at Toulouse.  Minut was her devoted admirer and addressed an affectionate poem to her just before his death.  She was seventy years of age when he wrote the elaborate account of her beauty.  She had blue eyes and fair hair, though belonging to one of the darkest parts of France.

Ploss and Bartels (Das Weib, bd. 1, sec. 3) have independently brought together a number of passages from the writers of many countries describing their ideals of beauty.  On this collection I have not drawn.

When we survey broadly the ideals of feminine beauty set down by the peoples of many lands, it is interesting to note that they all contain many features which appeal to the aesthetic taste of the modern European, and many of them, indeed, contain no features which obviously clash with his canons of taste.  It may even be said that the ideals of some savages affect us more sympathetically than some of the ideals of our own mediaeval ancestors.  As a matter of fact, European travelers in all parts of the world have met with women who were gracious and pleasant to look on, and not seldom even in the strict sense beautiful, from the standpoint of European standards.  Such individuals have been found even among those races with the greatest notoriety for ugliness.

Even among so primitive and remote a people as the Australians beauty in the European sense is sometimes found.  “I have on two occasions,” Lumholtz states, “seen what might be called beauties among the women of western Queensland.  Their hands were small, their feet neat and well shaped, with so high an instep that one asked oneself involuntarily where in the world they had acquired this aristocratic mark of beauty.  Their figure was above criticism, and their skin, as is usually the case among the young women, was as soft as velvet.  When these black