robation; and consequently depreciatory remarks or ridicule, whether
of our appearance or conduct, cause us to blush much more readily than
does praise. But undoubtedly praise and admiration are highly efficient:
a pretty girl blushes when a man gazes intently at her, though she may
know perfectly well that he is not depreciating her. Many children, as
well as old and sensitive persons, blush when they are much praised.
Hereafter the question will be discussed how it has arisen that the
consciousness that others are attending to our personal appearance
should have led to the capillaries, especially those of the face,
instantly becoming filled with blood.

My reasons for believing that attention directed to personal appearance,
and not to moral conduct, has been the fundamental element in the
acquirement of the habit of blushing will now be given. They are
separately light, but combined possess, as it appears to me,
considerable weight. It is notorious that nothing makes a shy person
blush so much as any remark, however slight, on his personal appearance.
One cannot notice even the dress of a woman much given to blushing
without causing her face to crimson. It is sufficient to stare hard at
some persons to make them, as Coleridge remarks, blush--"account for
that he who can."

With the two albinos observed by Dr. Burgess, "the slightest attempt to
examine their peculiarities" invariably caused them to blush deeply.
Women are much more sensitive about their personal appearance than men
are, especially elderly women in comparison with elderly men, and they
blush much more freely. The young of both sexes are much more sensitive
on this same head than the old, and they also blush much more freely
than the old. Children at a very early age do not blush; nor do they
show those other signs of self-consciousness which generally accompany
blushing; and it is one of their chief charms that they think nothing
about what others think of them. At this early age they will stare at a
stranger with a fixed gaze and unblinking eyes, as on an inanimate
object, in a manner which we elders cannot imitate.

It is plain to everyone that young men and women are highly sensitive to
the opinion of each other with reference to their personal appearance;
and they blush incomparably more in the presence of the opposite sex
than in that of their own. A young man, not very liable to blush, will
blush intensely at any slight ridicule of his appearan