th shallow cerebrum has only to incline
his head so that the lying instrument can select a favorable focus, to
appear in the picture with the brow of a sage and the chin of a poet.
Of all the arts for ministering to human vanity the photographic is the
most useful, but it is a poor aid in the revelation of character. You
shall learn more of a man's real nature by seeing him walk once up the
broad aisle of his church to his pew on Sunday, than by studying his
photograph for a month.

No, we do not get any certain standard of men by a chart of their
temperaments; it will hardly answer to select a wife by the color of her
hair; though it be by nature as red as a cardinal's hat, she may be
no more constant than if it were dyed. The farmer who shuns all the
lymphatic beauties in his neighborhood, and selects to wife the most
nervous-sanguine, may find that she is unwilling to get up in the winter
mornings and make the kitchen fire. Many a man, even in this scientific
age which professes to label us all, has been cruelly deceived in
this way. Neither the blondes nor the brunettes act according to the
advertisement of their temperaments. The truth is that men refuse to
come under the classifications of the pseudo-scientists, and all our
new nomenclatures do not add much to our knowledge. You know what to
expect--if the comparison will be pardoned--of a horse with certain
points; but you wouldn't dare go on a journey with a man merely upon the
strength of knowing that his temperament was the proper mixture of the
sanguine and the phlegmatic. Science is not able to teach us concerning
men as it teaches us of horses, though I am very far from saying that
there are not traits of nobleness and of meanness that run through
families and can be calculated to appear in individuals with absolute
certainty; one family will be trusty and another tricky through all
its members for generations; noble strains and ignoble strains are
perpetuated. When we hear that she has eloped with the stable-boy and
married him, we are apt to remark, "Well, she was a Bogardus." And when
we read that she has gone on a mission and has died, distinguishing
herself by some extraordinary devotion to the heathen at Ujiji, we think
it sufficient to say, "Yes, her mother married into the Smiths." But
this knowledge comes of our experience of special families, and stands
us in stead no further.

If we cannot classify men scientifically and reduce them under a kind