[154] C.H.  Stratz, Die Schoenheit des Weiblichen Koerpers, fourteenth edition, Chapter XII.

[155] See, e.g., Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, pp. 59-75.

[156] Sergi (The Mediterranean Race, Chapter 1), by an analysis of Homer’s color epithets, argues that in very few cases do they involve fairness; but his attempt scarcely seems successful, although most of these epithets are undoubtedly vague and involve a certain range of possible color.

[157] Lechat’s study of the numerous realistic colored statues recently discovered in Greece (summarized in Zentralblatt fuer Anthropologie, 1904, ht. 1, p. 22) shows that with few exceptions the hair is fair.

[158] Renier, Il Tipo Estetico, pp. 127 et seq.  In another book, Les Femmes Blondes selon les Peintres de l’Ecole de Venise, par deux Venitiens (one of these “Venetians” being Armand Baschet), is brought together much information concerning the preference for blondes in literature, together with a great many of the recipes anciently used for making the hair fair.

[159] J. Houdoy, La Beaute des Femmes dans la Litterature et dans l’Art du XIIe au XVIe Siecle, 1876, pp. 32 et seq.

[160] Houdoy, op. cit., pp. 41 et seq.

[161] Houdoy, op. cit., p. 83.

[162] Brantome, Vie des Dames Galantes, Discours II.

[163] Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, Sec.  II, Mem.  II, Subs.  II.

[164] It is significant that Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, loc. cit.), while praising golden hair, also argues that “of all eyes black are moist amiable,” quoting many examples to this effect from classic and later literature.

[165] “Relative Abilities of the Fair and the Dark,” Monthly Review, August, 1901; cf.  H. Ellis, A Study of British Genius, p. 215.

[166] Stratz, Die Schoenheit des Weiblichen Koerpers, p. 217.

[167] Bloch (Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, pp. 261 et seq.) brings together some facts bearing on the admiration for negresses in Paris and elsewhere.

III.

Beauty not the Sole Element in the Sexual Appeal of Vision—­Movement—­The
Mirror—­Narcissism—­Pygmalionism—­Mixoscopy—­The Indifference of Women to
Male Beauty—­The Significance of Woman’s Admiration of Strength—­The
Spectacle of Strength is a Tactile Quality made Visible.

Our discussion of the sensory element of vision in human sexual selection has been mainly an attempt to disentangle the chief elements of beauty in so far as beauty is a stimulus to the sexual instinct.  Beauty by no means comprehends the whole of the influences which make for sexual allurement through vision, but it is the point at which all the most powerful and subtle of these are focussed; it represents a fairly definite complexus, appealing at once to the sexual and to the aesthetic impulses, to which no other sense can furnish anything in any degree analogous.  It is because this conception of beauty has arisen upon it that vision properly occupies the supreme position in man from the point of view which we here occupy.