Physiognomy illustrated; or, nature's revelations of character : A description of the mental, moral, and volitive dispositions of mankind, as manifested in the human form and countenance / By Joseph Simms, M.D. ... Complete in one volume and illustrated by upwards of three hundred engravings.

  • Simms, Joseph, 1833-1920.
Date:
1887 [©1887]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physiognomy illustrated; or, nature's revelations of character : A description of the mental, moral, and volitive dispositions of mankind, as manifested in the human form and countenance / By Joseph Simms, M.D. ... Complete in one volume and illustrated by upwards of three hundred engravings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    instinctively to bring! The maternal yearning of the mother clothes her face in lineaments of the deepest tenderness, and attracts in unquestioning reliance, the confidence and assurance of safety in the child; and as its Physiognomical studies are extended, it quickly learns to crow and laugh in the face of the benevolent stranger, or to bury its affrighted head in its mother's lap at the approach of malevolence. Were it not for this inborn principle, infancy could have no impressions of love or terror whatever, because, at that period the reasoning faculty is latent, and does not arise in its strength until long after the truth or error of the first impressions have been tested, and tested we may add almost invariably, with the result of endorsing in the fullest degree the fidelity of nature to its law. The mind of man is alternately a prey to every conceivable variety of emotion and feeling, and by turns it is possessed by joy, desire, dislike, hatred, grief, love, courage, despair, confidence, contempt, admiration, cowardice, cruelty, pride, modesty, scorn, compassion, spleen; or by the intellectual capacities, reason, attention, discrimination, observation, retention, comparison, wit, taste, imagination, intuition, &c., &c. Each of these feelings and emotions has itself reproduced and photographed in some lineaments of the exterior; and each of these pictures has its distinctive characteristic, as accurately defined and distinct, as its prototype of the interior. In proportion as any particular emotion, or set of emotions, holds sway in the human breast, so in proportion does its photograph, picture or Physiog- nomical equivalent, become more conspicuous and less evanescent; and it is the promise of the Science of Physiognomy so to formulate this unerring reproduction of the pencil of nature herself, as to enable its student to read the messages from the interior with unfaltering accuracy. The mind long given up to bursts of uncon- trollable passion, like a tempest-tossed rudderless ship.