The beauty of color is not less conspicuous than that of form in this class of beings.
SECTION III.
ELEMENTS OF BEAUTY IN THINKING BEINGS.
I have next to show that, in thinking beings, while the characters of inanimate, and those of living beauty, are still more or less continued, new characteristics are also added to them.
I. In animals, accordingly, the bones bear a close analogy to the wood of plants. They generally assume the same rounded form; but, as thinking beings are necessarily moving ones, their bones are hollow to combine lightness with strength, and they are separated by joints to permit flexion and extension.
II. As animals, like plants, grow and reproduce, a portion of their general organization, their vascular system, which serves the purpose of growth and reproduction, consists, like plants, of trunks, branches, &c.; and the surface of their bodies, the skin, is formed by a tissue of these vessels. Accordingly, both the vessels themselves, and the tissue which they form, present the delicacy, the bending, the variety, and the contrast, which are the characters of the preceding species of beauty.
The undulating and serpentine lines which art seeks always to design in its most beautiful productions, exist in greater number at the surface of the human body than at that of any other animal. Wherever, as Hogarth observes, “for the sake of the necessary motion of the parts, with proper strength and agility, the insertions of the muscles are too hard and sudden, their swellings too bold, or the hollows between them too deep, for their outlines to be beautiful; nature softens these hardnesses, and plumps up these vacancies with a proper supply of fat, and covers the whole with the soft, smooth, springy, and, in delicate life, almost transparent skin, which, conforming itself to the external shape of all the parts beneath, expresses to the eye the idea of its contents with the utmost delicacy of beauty and grace.”
It is principally in the features of the face, as has often been observed, and on the surface of the torso and of the members of a beautiful woman, that these delicate, bending, varied, and contrasted lines are multiplied: by their union, they mark the outlines of different parts, as in the region of the neck, of the bosom, at the shoulders, on the surface of the abdomen, on the sides, and principally in the gradual transitions from the head to the neck, and from the loins to the inferior extremities.
These lines vary under different circumstances; much enbonpoint producing round lines, and leanness or old age producing straight ones.
Woman and man stand pre-eminent among animals as to this kind of beauty; and to them succeed the swifter animals, as the horse, the stag, &c.
The animals, on the contrary, of which the surface presents right lines and square forms, are correspondingly deprived of beauty; as the toad, the hog, and all the animals which seem to us ugly.