al as
well as physical peculiarities in the individual.

We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in love
with one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seated
differential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementary
features, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and
experience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocal
affection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unison
by varying qualities in the respective individuals.

Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency very little doubt
can be reasonably entertained. We _do_ fall in love, taking us in the
lump, with the young, the beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do
_not_ fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the
feeble, and the sickly. The prohibition of the Church is scarcely needed
to prevent a man from marrying his grandmother. Moralists have always
borne a special grudge to pretty faces; but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
admirably put it (long before the appearance of Darwin's selective
theory), 'the saying that beauty is but skin-deep is itself but a
skin-deep saying.' In reality, beauty is one of the very best guides we
can possibly have to the desirability, so far as race-preservation is
concerned, of any man or any woman as a partner in marriage. A fine
form, a good figure, a beautiful bust, a round arm and neck, a fresh
complexion, a lovely face, are all outward and visible signs of the
physical qualities that on the whole conspire to make up a healthy and
vigorous wife and mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a good
circulation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are
roughly indicative of dyspepsia and anaemia; a flat chest is a symptom of
deficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one way
or another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standard
of the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an
active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean feeble virility. Nor
are indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting as
recognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is in
itself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive
features. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid,
half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular their
lines and contours. Intelligence and goo