There will be little doubt he will answer “Health.” After that probably he may say “Beauty.” In addition the reader of Mr. Galton’s _Hereditary Genius_ will probably say, “ability,” “capacity,” “genius,” and “energy.” The reader of Doctor Nordau will add “sanity.” And the reader of Mr. Archdall Reid will round up the list with “immunity” from dipsomania and all contagious diseases. “Let us mark our human beings,” the reader of that way of thinking will suggest, “let us give marks for ‘health,’ for ‘ability,’ for various sorts of specific immunity and so forth, and let us weed out those who are low in the scale and multiply those who stand high. This will give us a straight way to practical amelioration, and the difficulty you are trying to raise,” he urges, “vanishes forthwith.” It would, if these points were really points, if “beauty,” “capacity,” “health,” and “sanity” were simple and uniform things. Unfortunately they are not simple, and with that fact a host of difficulties arise. Let me take first the most simple and obvious case of “beauty.” If beauty were a simple thing, it would be possible to arrange human beings in a simple scale, according to whether they had more or less of this simple quality--just as one can do in the case of what are perhaps really simple and breedable qualities--height or weight. This person, one might say, is at eight in the scale of beauty, and this at ten, and this at twenty-seven. But it complicates the case beyond the possibilities of such a scale altogether when one begins to consider that there are varieties and types of beauty having very wide divergences and made up of a varying number of elements in dissimilar proportions. There is, for example, the flaxen, kindly beauty of the Dutch type, the dusky Jewess, the tall, fair Scandinavian, the dark and brilliant south Italian, the noble Roman, the dainty Japanese--to name no others. Each of these types has its peculiar and incommensurable points, and within the limits of each type you will find a hundred divergent, almost unanalyzable, styles, a beauty of expression, a beauty of carriage, a beauty of reflection, a beauty of repose, arising each from a quite peculiar proportion of parts and qualities, and having no definable relation at all to any of the others. If we were to imagine a human appearance as made up of certain elements, a, b, c, d, e, f, etc., then we might suppose that beauty in one case was attained by a certain high development of a and f, in another by a certain fineness of c and d, in another by a delightfully subtle ratio of f and b. A, b, c, d, e, F, etc. a, b, _c_, _d_, e, f, etc. a, _b_, c, d, e, _F_, etc.,