There is little known exactly with regard to the proportion of the human figure, for the same parts do not bear similar proportions in any two individuals; nor even in the same, for seldom is it that the right leg or arm is of equal dimensions with the left. It is not by taking an exact _resemblance_ that we can determine on the best proportion of the human figure; we must seek for it in taste and sentiment, which have exceeded the laws of mechanism in the imitation of Nature; and in which imitation we recognize her perfections more conspicuously than in her own productions; and by the same rule the beauty of the best statues is much better conceived by observation than by measurement. The ancients executed statues in so high a degree of perfection, that they have ever been considered as exact representations of the most perfect human figures. These statues, which were at first copied after the human form, are now considered as the most perfect models of it; and for this plain reason, that they were not formed after any one individual, but from a diligent observation of the perfect symmetry that was to be collected, as it were, from the whole species. In doing this, these artists also considered each part of the human frame should be of certain dimensions to become the standard of perfection; for instance, that the body should be ten times the length of the face; and that the face should also be divisible into three equal parts, the first form the hair on the forehead to the nose, the second the nose, and the third from the nose to the end of the chin. In measuring the body they use the term nose as the third of the face, one of which they reckon in height, from the top of the forehead to the crown of the head, therefore from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin is a face and one third, and from the chin to the upper part of the breasts two thirds more, which of course makes two tenths of the whole body; to the bottom of the paps another, to the navel a fourth, and from thence to the division of the lower extremities a fifth, or half the body; two more faces are assigned to the thighs, half a one to the knee, two from the knee to the top of the foot, and the other half from thence to the sole, which completes the ten. This division does not hold good in men of a more than ordinary size, in whom about half a face is allowed between the paps and the commencement of the thighs, which in them is not the middle of the body. The arms being stretched out, measure from the ends of the middle fingers ten faces, or exactly the length of the body. The hand is the length of the face, the thumb that of the nose, as is also the longest toe, and the bottom of the foot, is one sixth part of the length of the body. The space between the eyes is the breadth of the eye: the breadth of the thickest part of the thigh is double that of the thickest part of the leg, and treble the smallest.