Indian types of beauty

—BY—
R. W. SHUFELDT,
Captain Medical Department, U.S. Army .
Member of the Philosophical, the Anthropological, the Biological, and the Entomological Societies of Washington, D.C.; Member of the Cosmos, of Washington; Member of the American Society, and Honorable Associate of the British Society for Psychical Research; Member of the American Ornithologists’ Union; Member of the American Society of Naturalists; Cor. Member Soc. Ital. Anthrop. Ethnol. and Psicol. Comp. of Florence, Italy; Cor. Member of the Zool. Soc. of London; Cor. Member Biol. Association of Colorado; the Academy of Nat. Sciences of Philadelphia: of the Academy of Sciences, Chicago; of the Linnæan Soc. of New York; Member of the International Copyright League; Member of the Anthropometrical Soc.; Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Member American Society of Anatomists, etc., etc.
INDIAN TYPES OF BEAUTY.
One of the most interesting studies in the entire range of the science of ethnology is the estimate of beauty arrived at by various peoples. It really seems that the lower the race in the scale of civilization the more fixed and restricted are their ideas in this direction; that is to say, the men among the lower races can see beauty in the women of their own tribe presenting certain characteristics, as the women of the same tribe see comeliness in certain of the men, but neither of them recognize any beauty in those considered beautiful or handsome by the members of other tribes. On the other hand, the majority of the men, at least among the Indo-Europeans, can often see beauty in women of the greatest variety of other countries than their own. Perhaps one of the best proofs of this is the fact that they sometimes marry them. Even here in the United States it is not difficult to find instances, and these, too, in any plane of society we may select, where men have married women of other races and nationalities. And as a wise philosopher and observer has said, “In civilized life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance,” it is fair to presume that the man in any case was attracted by what he considered to be the woman’s beauty. In my own personal experience, cases have been met with where those among us have married negro women, and negro women as black as ever graced the banks of the Congo of the West Coast. Others have married Chinese women, and a friend of mine has a very talented little Japanese wife. Nor is the Englishman Rolfe the only white man that ever married an Indian woman; one of the generals in our own army married such, and there is every reason to believe that he was influenced by her beauty alone.