atz, _Die Schoenheit des
Weiblichen Koerpers_, Chapter III.)

Gabriel de Minut, who published in 1587 a treatise of no very
great importance, _De la Beaute_, also wrote under the title of
_La Paulegraphie_ a very elaborate description, covering sixty
pages, of Paule de Viguier, a Gascon lady of good family and
virtuous life living at Toulouse. Minut was her devoted admirer
and addressed an affectionate poem to her just before his death.
She was seventy years of age when he wrote the elaborate account
of her beauty. She had blue eyes and fair hair, though belonging
to one of the darkest parts of France.

Ploss and Bartels (_Das Weib_, bd. 1, sec. 3) have independently
brought together a number of passages from the writers of many
countries describing their ideals of beauty. On this collection I
have not drawn.

When we survey broadly the ideals of feminine beauty set down by the
peoples of many lands, it is interesting to note that they all contain
many features which appeal to the aesthetic taste of the modern European,
and many of them, indeed, contain no features which obviously clash with
his canons of taste. It may even be said that the ideals of some savages
affect us more sympathetically than some of the ideals of our own mediaeval
ancestors. As a matter of fact, European travelers in all parts of the
world have met with women who were gracious and pleasant to look on, and
not seldom even in the strict sense beautiful, from the standpoint of
European standards. Such individuals have been found even among those
races with the greatest notoriety for ugliness.

Even among so primitive and remote a people as the Australians
beauty in the European sense is sometimes found. "I have on two
occasions," Lumholtz states, "seen what might be called beauties
among the women of western Queensland. Their hands were small,
their feet neat and well shaped, with so high an instep that one
asked oneself involuntarily where in the world they had acquired
this aristocratic mark of beauty. Their figure was above
criticism, and their skin, as is usually the case among the young
women, was as soft as velvet. When these black daughters of Eve
smiled and showed their beautiful white teeth, and when their
eyes peeped coquettishly from beneath the curly hair which hung
in quite the modern fashion down their foreheads," Lumholtz
r