number of Javanese girls a few suitable for photographing, Stratz was surprised to find that a Javanese doctor pointed out as most beautiful those which most closely corresponded to the European type. (Stratz, Die Rassenschoenheit des Weibes, fourth edition, 1903, p. 3; id., Die Koerperformen der Japaner, 1904, p. 78.)

Stratz reproduces (Rassenschoenheit, pp. 36 et seq.) a representation of Kwan-yin, the Chinese goddess of divine love, and quotes some remarks of Borel’s concerning the wide deviation of the representations of the goddess, a type of gracious beauty, from the Chinese racial type.  Stratz further reproduces the figure of a Buddhistic goddess from Java (now in the Archaeological Museum of Leyden) which represents a type of loveliness corresponding to the most refined and classic European ideal.

Not only is there a fundamentally objective element in beauty throughout the human species, but it is probably a significant fact that we may find a similar element throughout the whole animated world.  The things that to man are most beautiful throughout Nature are those that are intimately associated with, or dependent upon, the sexual process and the sexual instinct.  This is the case in the plant world.  It is so throughout most of the animal world, and, as Professor Poulton, in referring to this often unexplained and indeed unnoticed fact, remarks, “the song or plume which excites the mating impulse in the hen is also in a high proportion of cases most pleasing to man himself.  And not only this, but in their past history, so far as it has been traced (e.g., in the development of the characteristic markings of the male peacock and argus pheasant), such features have gradually become more and more pleasing to us as they have acted as stronger and stronger stimuli to the hen."[133]

FOOTNOTES: 

[131] “It is likely that all visible parts of the organism, even those with a definite physiological meaning, appeal to the aesthetic sense of the opposite sex,” Poulton remarks, speaking primarily of insects, in words that apply still more accurately to the human species.  E. Poulton, The Colors of Animals, 1890, p. 304.

[132] “The Arabs in general,” Lane remarks, “entertain a prejudice against blue eyes—­a prejudice said to have arisen from the great number of blue-eyed persons among certain of their northern enemies.”

[133] Nature, April 14, 1898, p. 55.

II.

Beauty to Some Extent Consists Primitively in an Exaggeration of the Sexual Characters—­The Sexual Organs—­Mutilations, Adornments, and Garments—­Sexual Allurement the Original Object of Such Devices—­The Religious Element—­Unaesthetic Character of the Sexual Organs—­Importance of the Secondary Sexual Characters—­The Pelvis and Hips—­Steatopygia—­Obesity—­Gait—­The Pregnant Woman as a Mediaeval Type of Beauty—­The Ideals of the Renaissance—­The Breasts—­The Corset—­Its Object—­Its History—­Hair—­The Beard—­The Element of National or Racial Type in Beauty—­The Relative Beauty of Blondes and Brunettes—­The General European Admiration for Blondes—­The Individual Factors in the Constitution of the Idea of Beauty—­The Love of the Exotic.