Whether among the lowest savages or in
the highest civilization, the poet and story-teller who seeks to describe
an ideally lovely and desirable woman always insists mainly, and often
exclusively, on those characters which appeal to the eye. The richly laden
word _beauty_ is a synthesis of complex impressions obtained through a
single sense, and so simple, comparatively, and vague are the impressions
derived from the other senses that none of them can furnish us with any
corresponding word.
Before attempting to analyze the conception of beauty, regarded
in its sexual appeal to the human mind, it may be well to bring
together a few fairly typical descriptions of a beautiful woman
as she appears to the men of various nations.
In an Australian folklore story taken down from the lips of a
native some sixty years ago by W. Dunlop (but evidently not in
the native's exact words) we find this description of an
Australian beauty: "A man took as his wife a beautiful girl who
had long, glossy hair hanging around her face and down her
shoulders, which were plump and round. Her face was adorned with
red clay and her person wrapped in a fine large opossum rug
fastened by a pin formed from the small bone of the kangaroo's
leg, and also by a string attached to a wallet made of rushes
neatly plaited of small strips skinned from their outside after
they had been for some time exposed to the heat of the fire;
which being thrown on her back, the string passing under one arm
and across her breast, held the soft rug in a fanciful position
of considerable elegance; and she knew well how to show to
advantage her queenlike figure when she walked with her polished
yam stick held in one of her small hands and her little feet
appearing below the edge of the rug" (W.
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