"It is said," observes Burke, "that the idea of a part's being well adapted to answer its end, is one cause of beauty, or indeed beauty itself.... In framing this theory, I am apprehensive that experience was not sufficiently consulted. For, on that principle, the wedgelike snout of a swine with its tough cartilage at the end, the little sunk eyes, and the whole make of the head, so well adapted to its offices of digging and rooting, would be extremely beautiful."--And so they are, when the beauty of fitness for their purpose is considered; but that purpose being the mere growth and fattening of an animal of sensual and dirty habits, it is a fallacy to represent this, without explanation, as a fair proof of the absence of connexion between fitness and beauty. "If beauty in our species," says the same writer, "was annexed to use, men would be much more lovely than women; and strength and agility would be considered as the only beauties."--Burke was a stringer of fine words, not for woman, but for queens, when that served a selfish and venal purpose. The sentence just quoted shows that his gallantry was as ignorant as it was mean. He here asserts by implication that women are less useful than men, although it is to women that the care of the whole human race, during its most helpless years, is committed, and although they take upon themselves all that half of the duties of life which men are as little capable of performing, as women are of performing the portion suited to men. "And," says he, "I appeal to the first and most natural feelings of mankind, whether, on beholding a beautiful eye, or a well-fashioned mouth, or a well-turned leg, any ideas of their being well fitted for seeing, eating, or running, ever present themselves."--Is running, then, the proper use of the leg in woman! Rousseau more truly thought its use was to _fail_ in running, or _not_ to run! Is eating the only use of her mouth! This, too from the man who deplored that "the age of chivalry was gone!"--Nevertheless, I will venture to assert that such things never were and never will be seen, without suggesting ideas of fitness of some kind or other. "There is," he proceeds, "another notion current, pretty closely allied to the former; that perfection is the constituent cause of beauty. This opinion has been made to extend much farther than to sensible objects. But in these, so far is perfection, considered as such, from being the cause of beauty, that this quality, where it is highest in the female sex, almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection."--For this plain reason, that female perfection is utterly incompatible with great muscular perfection or strength, which would indeed be injurious to the performance of every feminine function. We may now advance another step in the subject under discussion. What, then, are the peculiar physical characters of beings thus possessing sense and motion, and thus characterized by fitness?