grown again.  A passage in Ordericus Vitalis (Ecclesiastical History, Book VIII, Chapter X) is interesting both as regards the fashions of the twelfth century in England and Normandy and the feeling that prompted Ordericus.  Speaking of the men of his time, he wrote:  “The forepart of their head is bare after the manner of thieves, while at the back they nourish long hair like harlots.  In former times penitents, captives and pilgrims usually went unshaved and wore long beards, as an outward mark of their penance or captivity or pilgrimage.  Now almost all the world wear crisped hair and beards, carrying on their faces the token of their filthy lust like stinking goats.  Their locks are curled with hot irons, and instead of wearing caps they bind their heads with fillets.  A knight seldom appears in public with his head uncovered, and properly shaved, according to the apostolic precept (I Corinthians, Chapter XI, verses 7 and 14).”

We have seen that there is good reason for assuming a certain fundamental tendency whereby the most various peoples of the world, at all events in the person of their most intelligent members, recognize and accept a common ideal of feminine beauty, so that to a certain extent beauty may be said to have an objectively aesthetic basis.  We have further found that this aesthetic human ideal is modified, and very variously modified in different countries and even in the same country at different periods, by a tendency, prompted by a sexual impulse which is not necessarily in harmony with aesthetic cannons, to emphasize, or even to repress, one or other of the prominent secondary sexual characters of the body.  We now come to another tendency which is apt to an even greater extent to limit the cultivation of the purely aesthetic ideal of beauty:  the influences of national or racial type.

To the average man of every race the woman who most completely embodies the type of his race is usually the most beautiful, and even mutilations and deformities often have their origin, as Humboldt long since pointed out, in the effort to accentuate the racial type.[152] Eastern women possess by nature large and conspicuous eyes, and this characteristic they seek still further to heighten by art.  The Ainu are the hairiest of races, and there is nothing which they consider so beautiful as hair.  It is difficult to be sexually attracted to persons who are fundamentally unlike ourselves in racial constitution.[153]

It frequently happens that this admiration for racial characteristics leads to the idealization of features which are far removed from aesthetic beauty.  The firm and rounded breast is certainly a feature of beauty, but among many of the black peoples of Africa the breasts fall at a very early period, and here we sometimes find that the hanging breast is admired as beautiful.