Of course this instinctive preference is fundamental. We are prepared to hear from science that the African savage prefers the thick lips and flat nose of the African girl to any other sort; that this is why the African girl has a flat nose and thick lips; that gallantry is a phase of natural selection, and so on. We can understand that there is a merely relative difference of attitude between the savage lover who woos his lady with a club, and the modern suitor who swears to give up all of his clubs for her sake. What perplexes us is our anxiety to explain our modern instinct, and (what is more perplexing) our anxiety to explain _her_; to ascertain and even to catalogue her essential traits--to discover, if not why we prefer the American girl, at least what manner of girl it is that we thus are instinctively preferring. What is the American type? Is the typical American girl as the British novelist so often has described her--rich, noisy, wasp-waisted and slangy? Is she a “Daisy Miller” or a “Fair Barbarian”? Is she what Richard Grant White feared she too often was, “a creature composed in equal parts of mind and leather”? Is she Emerson’s “Fourth of July of Zoology,” or is she illustrating the discovery which Irving claimed to have made among certain philosophers “that all animals degenerate in America and man among the number”? [Illustration] From those foreigners who make a Cook’s tour examination of us, the evidence in favor of the proposition that we grow more pretty and witty women to the acre than any other country in the world, is overwhelming. But there are obvious reasons why we must distrust this foreign comment. Too often it plainly is a propitiatory item, when it is not illustrating a flippant wish among men writers to occupy Disraeli’s position “on the side of the angels.” That traveller has a profound distaste for a country who does not find that it has pretty women. If anything is more inevitable than this, it is that the traveller will find fault with the type preferred by the men of the country he is visiting. “What is most amazing,” says the observer in Zululand or elsewhere, “is that the prettiest women, the women without this or that hideous deformity, are not admired by the men.” The Kaffir prince on a visit to England, or the Apache chief among the palefaces in the city of the Great Father, invariably are astounded at the obtuseness of the white men. I remember once listening to a group of New York artists who were discussing preferred types of women, and it was agreed, with a hopeless and resentful unanimity, that most New Yorkers preferred fat women, since most of the good clothes and diamonds were worn by fat women. All of which goes to show, perhaps, that natural selection is an exclusive affair.