A woman who has given birth to and nursed an infant begins to lay on fat, and this tendency to obesity becomes more pronounced as the climacteric period approaches. The breasts become inelastic and pendent, the abdomen becomes ungracefully prominent; the tonicity of the entire organism gradually declines, and, in consequence of the loss of elasticity in the subcutaneous cellular tissue, the dreaded wrinkles make their appearance and the features become wizened. Beauty is a thing of the past. With the cessation of the sexual life the external secondary sexual characters disappear, and the old woman is even farther removed than the old man from our conception of beauty. As _Mantegazza_ insists, the beauties peculiar to women are one and all sexual; they depend, that is to say, upon the peculiar functions that nature has allotted to woman in the great mystery of procreation. One of the most vivid and poetical descriptions in ancient or modern literature of these secondary sexual characters on which feminine beauty depends is to be found in the Song of Solomon. In the following figure (FIG. 7) the curve of beauty of woman is given as drawn up by _Stratz_. In one case it may rise very quickly, to decline with equal quickness—the so-called _beauté du diable_;[16] in other cases, again, the curve rises very slowly, and declines also very slowly, the culmination of the curve being in this case attained later, and when attained being absolutely higher, than in the case of the steeper curve. [Illustration: FIG. 7. ] The age at which the maximum of beauty is attained is a very variable one. In the southern races this often occurs as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth year of life; but in the peoples of the Teutonic stock, Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, and English, not as a rule before the twentieth year, and it may be even later. _Stratz_ has known cases in which women did not attain the prime of their beauty until the thirtieth and even the thirty-third year. The same author, a most competent authority as regards the subject of feminine beauty, affirms that a beautiful woman is most beautiful when the period of maximum beauty coincides in her case with the first month of her first pregnancy. With the commencement of pregnancy the processes of nutrition are accelerated, all the tissues are tensely filled, the skin is more delicately and at the same time more brightly tinted owing to the greater activity of the circulation, the breasts become firmer and more elastic. Thus the attractive characteristics of beauty at its fullest maturity become enhanced, but for a short time only, since the enlargement of the abdomen in the further course of pregnancy impairs the harmony of the figure. Finally we must point out, before dismissing this subject, that women of the so-called better classes arrive as a rule at maturity later, and remain beautiful for a longer period, than women of the working classes.