Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 January 1883 — About Noses. [ARTICLE]

About Noses.

It has been the custom for people of all races to admire, or pretend to admire, their own noses, and to sneer at those that differed from them. The Semitic nosA has never been thought by the world at large to correspond'with any principle of beauty. Yet the Arabs and Syrians speak contemptuously of the “flat-nosed Franks,” and Disraeli has taken pleasure in repeating the phrase. The Africans are proud of their broad, flat noses, and some tribes endeavor, by inserting artificial objects, to increase their -pet deformity. Time and careful breeding, which did so much for the noses of the Greeks and Romans, and have helped, and are helping, to make those of the Slav, Latin and Teuton races straight and beautiful, have done little to modify the prominent features of the Semitic and Turanian races. Most persons who have long noses are apt to be proud and boastful, arguing either that they are abstractly beautiful or that they indicate strength of character. The nose of Tennyson as seen in his portraits is long, and may in his youthful days have been finely modeled. He seems to have thought so, for in “Maud” he sneers at the druggist’s clerk as a “snubnosed rogue,” using au opprobrious term, common wherever the English language is spoken. Two hundred years ago the nose was longer than at present, if we idan judge by old por-' traits, and even the nasal organs of our Revolutionary sires were more pronounced than those of this generation, giving some color to the theory that the feature had some sort of relation to individual character.