It is manifest that man is now subject to much variability. No two individuals of the same race are quite alike. We may compare millions of faces, and each will be distinct. There is an equally great amount of diversity in the proportions and dimensions of the various parts of the body; the length of the legs being one of the most variable points.[140] Although in some quarters of the world an elongated skull, and in other quarters a short skull prevails, yet there is great diversity of shape even within the limits of the same race, as with the aborigines of America and South Australia,—the latter a race “probably as pure and homogeneous in blood, customs, and language as any in existence”—and even with the inhabitants of so confined an area as the Sandwich Islands.[141] An eminent dentist assures me that there is nearly as much diversity in the teeth, as in the features. The chief arteries so frequently run in abnormal courses, that it has been found useful for surgical purposes to calculate from 12,000 corpses how often each course prevails.[142] The muscles are eminently variable: thus those of the foot were found by Prof. Turner[143] not to be strictly alike in any two out of fifty bodies; and in some the deviations were considerable. Prof. Turner adds that the power of performing the appropriate movements must have been modified in accordance with the several deviations. Mr. J. Wood has recorded[144] the occurrence of 295 muscular variations in thirty-six subjects, and in another set of the same number no less than 558 variations, reckoning both sides of the body as one. In the last set, not one body out of the thirty-six was “found totally wanting in departures from the standard descriptions of the muscular system given in anatomical text-books.” A single body presented the extraordinary number of twenty-five distinct abnormalities. The same muscle sometimes varies in many ways: thus Prof. Macalister describes[145] no less than twenty distinct variations in the _palmaris accessorius_. The famous old anatomist, Wolff,[146] insists that the internal viscera are more variable than the external parts: _Nulla particula est quæ non aliter et aliter in aliis se habeat hominibus._ He has even written a treatise on the choice of typical examples of the viscera for representation. A discussion on the beau-ideal of the liver, lungs, kidneys, &c., as of the human face divine, sounds strange in our ears.