The whiteness, the transparency, and the color of the skin, have, in all highly civilized nations, been deemed essential conditions of beauty.
The ancients regarded whiteness, in particular, as the distinctive character of beauty; and they estimated that character so highly, that the name of Venus, from the Celtic ven, ben, or ban, signifies white, or whiteness; and Venus herself is said to be fair and golden-haired.
Among the civilized moderns, also a taste which women seek always to satisfy, is that for whiteness of the skin: hence, the white lily, new-fallen snow, white marble, or alabaster, are the images which poetry employs, when the color of a woman is its subject. So greatly, indeed, does whiteness contribute to beauty, that many women deemed beautiful by us, have little other right to that epithet except what they derive from a beautiful skin.
Third Variety or Modification of this Species of Beauty.
The branches of the great artery of the body, the aorta, supplying the abdomen and pelvis, are larger in woman than in man, as well as more habitually liable to variation in the quantity of their contents. The quantity of blood, also, which passes to the abdomen, is greater.
At the same time, the excretions are generally less in woman. Hippocrates says: “Nam corpus muliebre minus dissipatur quam virile;” the expenditure of the body of woman is less than that of man.
It is evident, then, that the secretions, nutrition, in particular, must be greater. We actually know them to be so.
But the nourishment of the organs concerned in locomotion is less active, and that of the cellular and adipose substance is generally more active, than in man. And on this, important consequences depend.
Woman is subject to crises which would destroy all her organs, if they offered too powerful a resistance. Some parts of her body are exposed to great shocks, to alternate extensions, compressions, and reductions, which could not take place with impunity, but by means of this predominance of the cellular and adipose structure.
The cellular expansion, the general basis of the structure, appears then to be more abundant in woman, more lax and yielding, more dilated and fuller of liquids; and it is by yielding gradually, by decomposing and weakening shocks by means of the general suppleness of the different organs, thus procured, that nature seems, in woman, to avoid, or to destroy, every hurtful effort.