ommonly and in perfection among
the white peoples of Europe. When in Japan he found that among
the numerous photographs of Japanese beauties everywhere to be
seen, his dragoman, a Japanese of low birth, selected as the most
beautiful those which displayed markedly the Japanese type with
narrow-slitted eyes and broad nose. When he sought the opinion of
a Japanese photographer, who called himself an artist and had
some claim to be so considered, the latter selected as most
beautiful three Japanese girls who in Europe also would have been
considered pretty. In Java, also, when selecting from a large
number of Javanese girls a few suitable for photographing, Stratz
was surprised to find that a Javanese doctor pointed out as most
beautiful those which most closely corresponded to the European
type. (Stratz, _Die Rassenschoenheit des Weibes_, fourth edition,
1903, p. 3; id., _Die Koerperformen der Japaner_, 1904, p. 78.)

Stratz reproduces (Rassenschoenheit, pp. 36 et seq.) a
representation of Kwan-yin, the Chinese goddess of divine love,
and quotes some remarks of Borel's concerning the wide deviation
of the representations of the goddess, a type of gracious beauty,
from the Chinese racial type. Stratz further reproduces the
figure of a Buddhistic goddess from Java (now in the
Archaeological Museum of Leyden) which represents a type of
loveliness corresponding to the most refined and classic European
ideal.

Not only is there a fundamentally objective element in beauty throughout
the human species, but it is probably a significant fact that we may find
a similar element throughout the whole animated world. The things that to
man are most beautiful throughout Nature are those that are intimately
associated with, or dependent upon, the sexual process and the sexual
instinct. This is the case in the plant world. It is so throughout most of
the animal world, and, as Professor Poulton, in referring to this often
unexplained and indeed unnoticed fact, remarks, "the song or plume which
excites the mating impulse in the hen is also in a high proportion of
cases most pleasing to man himself. And not only this, but in their past
history, so far as it has been traced (e.g., in the development of the
characteristic markings of the male peacock and argus pheasant), such
features have gradually become more and more pleasing to us as they have
act