should possess extensive knowledge, a thorough acquaintance with artists, mankind, vice, and virtue, the wise and the foolish, and particularly with children; together with a love of literature, and a taste for painting, and the other imitative arts. I say, can it need demonstration, that all those and much more are to him indispensable? To sum up the whole: to a well-formed, well organized body, the perfect physiognomist must unite an acute spirit of observation, a lively fancy, an excellent judgment, and, with numerous propensities to the arts and sciences, a strong, benevolent, enthusiastic, innocent heart; a heart confident in itself, and free from the passions inimical to man. No one, certainly, can read the traits of magnanimity, and the high qualities of the mind, who is not himself capable of magnanimity, honourable thoughts, and sublime actions.

Thus have I pronounced judgment against myself in writing these characteristics of the physiognomist. Not false modesty, but conscious feeling, impels me to say, that I am as distant from the true physiognomist as heaven is from earth. I am but the fragment of a physiognomist, as this work is but the fragment of a system of physiognomy.

CHAP. XVII.

Lavater's own Remarks on National Physiognomy.

It is undeniable, that there is national physiognomy, as well as national character. Whoever doubts of this can never have observed men of different nations, nor have compared the inhabitants of the extreme confines of any two. Compare a Negro and an Englishman, a native of Lapland and an Italian, a Frenchman and an inhabitant of Terra del Fuego. Examine their forms, countenances, characters, and minds. Their difference will be easily seen, though it will, sometimes, be very difficult to describe it scientifically.

It seems to me probable, that we shall discover what is national in the countenance better from the sight of an individual at first, than of a whole people; at least, so it appears to me from my own experience. Individual countenances discover more the characteristic of a whole nation, than a whole nation does that which is national in individuals. The following infinitely little is what I have hitherto observed from the foreigners with whom I have conversed, and whom I have noticed, concerning national cha

racter.

I am least able to characterise the French.

They have no trait so bold as the English, nor so minute as the Germans. I know them chiefly by their teeth and their laugh. The Italians 1 discover by the nose, small eyes, and projecting chin. The English by their foreheads and eyebrows. The Dutch by the rotundity of the head, and the weakness of the hair. The Germans by the angles and wrinkles round the eyes and in the cheeks. The Russians by the snub nose, and their light-coloured or black hair.

I shall now say a word concerning Englishmen in particular. Englishmen have the shortest and best arched foreheads; that is to say, they are arched only upwards, and, towards the eyebrows, either gently recline or are rectilinear. They very seldom have pointed, but often round, full, medullary noses; the Quakers and Moravians excepted, who, wherever they are found, are generally thin lipped. Englishmen have large, well defined, beautifully curved lips. They have also a round full chin; but they are peculiarly distinguished by the eyebrows and eyes, which are strong, open, liberal, and steadfast. The outline of their countenance is, in general, great, and they never have those numerous, infinitely minute traits, angles, and wrinkles, by which the Germans are so especially distinguished. Their complexion is fairer than that of the Germans.

All English women, whom I have known personally or by portrait, appear to be composed of marrow and nerve. They are inclined to be

tall, slender, soft, and as distant from all that is harsh, rigorous, or stubborn, as heaven is from earth.

The

The Swiss have generally no common physiognomy, or national character, the aspect of fidelity excepted. They are as different from each other as nations the most remote. French Swiss peasant is as distinct as possible from the peasant of Appenzel. It may be, that the eye of a foreigner would better discover the general character of the nation, and in what it differs from the French or German, than that of the native.

I find characteristic varieties in each canton of Switzerland. The inhabitants of Zurich, for instance, are middle sized, more frequently meagre than corpulent, but usually one or the other. They seldom have ardent eyes, and the outline is not often grand or minute. The men are seldom handsome, though the youth are incomparably so; but they soon alter. The people of Bern are tall, straight, fair, pliable, and firm, and are most distinguished by their upper teeth, which are white, regular, and easily to be seen. The inhabitants of Basle, or Basil, are more rotund, full, and tense of countenance, the complexion tinged with yellow, and the lips open and flaccid. Those of Schafhausen are hard boned. Their eyes are seldom sunken, but are generally prominent. The sides of the forehead diverge over the temples, the cheeks fleshy, and the mouth wide and open. They are commonly

stronger built than the people of Zurich, though, in the canton of Zurich, there is scarcely a village, in which the inhabitants do not differ from those of the neighbouring village, without attending to dress, which, notwithstanding, is also physiognomonical.

I have seen many handsome, broad-shouldered, strong, burden-bearing men, round Wadenschweil and Oberreid. At Weiningen, two leagues from Zurich, I met a company of well-formed men, who were distinguished for their cleanliness, circumspection, and gravity of deportment.

An extremely interesting and instructing book might be written on the physiognomonical character of the peasants of Switzerland. There are considerable districts, where the countenances, the nose not excepted, are most of them broad, as if pressed flat with a board. This disagreeable form, wherever found, is consistent with the character of the people. What could be more instructive than a physiognomonical and characteristic description of such villages, their mode of living, food, and occupation?

CHAP. XVIII.

Extracts from Buffon on National Physiognomy.

TRAVERSING the surface of the earth, and beginning in the north, we find, in Lapland, and on the northern coast of Tartary, a race of men,