appearance, and not to moral conduct, has been the fundamental element
in the acquirement of the habit of blushing, will now be given. They
are separately light, but combined possess, as it appears to me,
considerable weight. It is notorious that nothing makes a shy person
blush so much as any remark, however slight, on his personal
appearance. One cannot notice even the dress of a woman much given to
blushing, without causing her face to crimson. It is sufficient to
stare hard at some persons to make them, as Coleridge remarks,
blush, account for that he who can. [1323]
With the two albinos observed by Dr. Burgess,[1324] the slightest
attempt to examine their peculiarities invariably caused them to blush
deeply. Women are much more sensitive about their personal appearance
than men are, especially elderly women in comparison with elderly men,
and they blush much more freely. The young of both sexes are much more
sensitive on this same head than the old, and they also blush much more
freely than the old. Children at a very early age do not blush; nor do
they show those other signs of self-consciousness which generally
accompany blushing; and it is one of their chief charms that they think
nothing about what others think of them. At this early age they will
stare at a stranger with a fixed gaze and un-blinking eyes, as on an
inanimate object, in a manner which we elders cannot imitate.
It is plain to every one that young men and women are highly sensitive
to the opinion of each other with reference to their personal
appearance; and they blush incomparably more in the presence of the
opposite sex than in that of their own.[1325] A young man, not very
liable to blush, will blush intensely at any slight ridicule of his
appearance from a girl whose judgment on any important subject he would
disregard. No happy pair of young lovers, valuing each other s
admiration and love more than anything else in the world, probably ever
courted each other without many a blush. Even the barbarians of Tierra
del Fuego, according to Mr. Bridges, blush chiefly in regard to women,
but certainly also at their own personal appearance.
Of all parts of the body, the face is most considered and regarded, as
is natural from its being the chief seat of expression and the source
of the voice. It is also the chief seat of beauty and of ugliness, and
throughout the world is the most ornamented.[1326] The face, therefore,
will have been subjected during many generations to much closer and
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