his type exerts a great selection in the
education of the young. Educational methods run through fashions. Fads
in methods of teaching arise, are advocated with great emphasis, have
their run, decline, and disappear. There are fashions of standing,
walking, sitting, gesture, language (slang, expletives), pronunciation,
key of the voice, inflection, and sentence accent; fashions in shaking
hands, dancing, eating and drinking, showing respect, visiting, foods,
hours of meals, and deportment. When snuff was taken attitudes and
gestures in taking it were cultivated which were thought stylish.
Fashion determines what type of female beauty is at a time
preferred,--plump or _svelte_, blond or brunette, large or petite,
red-haired or black-haired. When was that "simple time of our fathers"
when people were too sensible to care for fashions? It certainly was
before the Pharaohs and perhaps before the glacial epoch. Isaiah (iii.
16) rebukes the follies of fashion. Chrysostom preached to the early
church against tricks and manners of gesture and walk which had been
learned in the theater. Since literature has existed moralists have
satirized fashion. Galton has noticed what any one may verify,--that old
portraits show "indisputable signs of one predominant type of face
supplanting another." "If we may believe caricaturists, the fleshiness
and obesity of many English men and women in the earlier years of this
century [nineteenth] must have been prodigious."[407] Part of this
phenomenon may be due to the fashion of painting. The portrait painter
warps all his subjects toward the current standard of "good looks," but
it is more probable that there is a true play of variation.
Platycnemism and the pierced olecranon run in groups for a time. Then
they run out. There are fashions in disease, as if fashion were really
in nature. This goes beyond the limits of our definition, but the rise
and passing away of variations in breeding plants and animals, and
perhaps in men, suggests that fashion may be an analogous play of
experiment, half caprice, half earnest, whose utility lies in selection.
If there was no reaching out after novelty except upon rational
determination, the case would be very different from what it is when
variation brings spontaneous suggestions. Our present modes of dress
(aside from the variations imposed by fashion) are the resultant of all
the fashions of the last two thousand years.

+192. All deformations by fashion