Journal of Anthropology, Jan. 1871, p. 323.
There is, however, reason to believe that in certain civilised and
semi-civilised nations sexual selection has effected something in
modifying the bodily frame of some of the members. Many persons are
convinced, as it appears to me with justice, that our aristocracy,
including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture
has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all
classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer,
according to the European standard, than the middle classes; yet the
middle classes are placed under equally favourable conditions of life
for the perfect development of the body. Cook remarks that the
superiority in personal appearance which is observable in the erees or
nobles in all the other islands (of the Pacific) is found in the
Sandwich Islands ; but this may be chiefly due to their better food and
manner of life.
The old traveller Chardin, in describing the Persians, says their
blood is now highly refined by frequent intermixtures with the
Georgians and Circassians, two nations which surpass all the world in
personal beauty. There is hardly a man of rank in Persia who is not
born of a Georgian or Circassian mother. He adds that they inherit
their beauty, not from their ancestors, for without the above mixture,
the men of rank in Persia, who are descendants of the Tartars, would be
extremely ugly. (2. These quotations are taken from Lawrence
( Lectures on Physiology, etc., 1822, p. 393), who attributes the
beauty of the upper classes in England to the men having long selected
the more beautiful women.) Here is a more curious case; the priestesses
who attended the temple of Venus Erycina at San-Giuliano in Sicily,
were selected for their beauty out of the whole of Greece; they were
not vestal virgins, and Quatrefages (3. Anthropologie, Revue des
Cours Scientifiques, Oct. 1868, p. 721.), who states the foregoing
fact, says that the women of San-Giuliano are now famous as the most
beautiful in the island, and are sought by artists as models. But it is
obvious that the evidence in all the above cases is doubtful.
The following case, though relating to savages, is well worth giving
for its curiosity. Mr. Winwood Reade informs me that the Jollofs, a
tribe of negroes on the west coast of Africa, are remarkable for their
uniformly fine appearance. A friend of his asked one of these men,
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