It is reasonable to suppose, that in endeavouring to form a standard or a canon of proportion for the human figure, the Greeks began with the head, its form, its position, the manner in which it is attached to the trunk; they found that man alone carries his head erect, and that thence he derives a face and a countenance. Of all the brute creation, what is called the head is only an extremity of the horizontal body, whose under parts are shoved forward to seek food or seize prey; front and upper part are driven back, are shortened, and, in more than one genus, hardly perceivable. The more the brute is raised before and erects the neck, the more it gains variety of aspect; still it hangs forward, an appendix to the trunk: it cannot be properly said to have a head; the etymology of the word implies an erect position. A head, strictly speaking, is the prerogative of man, formed beneath a skull which rounds the forehead and determines the face. The more the front recedes and inclines to the horizontal, so much the nearer a head approaches the form of a brute; the more it inclines to the perpendicular, the more it gains of man. This observation has been demonstrated in the least fallible manner by Camper, the anatomist, who, by a contrivance equally ingenious and unequivocal, appears to have ascertained, not only the difference of the _faceal_ line in animals, but that which discriminates nations. Placing the skull or head to be measured into a kind of sash or frame, pierced at equidistant intervals to admit the plummet and horizontal and perpendicular threads, he draws a straight line from the aperture of the ear to the under part of the nose, and another from the utmost projection of the frontal bone to the most prominent part of the upper jaw. The whole is divided into ninety or even one hundred degrees, from the actual maximum and minimum of Nature to those of Art. Birds describe the smallest angles, which widen in proportion as the animal approaches the human form: the heads of apes reach from forty-two to fifty degrees, which last approaches man. The Negro and Kalmuck reach seventy, the European eighty; the ancient Roman artists ascended to ninety-five, the Greeks raised the ideal _from ninety_ to one hundred degrees. What goes beyond this line becomes portentous; the head appears misshapen, and assumes the appearance of a hydrocephalus. It is the limit set by Art, and established on this physical principle: that the more the form of the head reclines to the horizontal or overshoots the given perpendicular, the more the maxillæ are protruded or the more the front, the less it retains of the true human form, and degenerates into brute or monster.