12 HUMAN PHYSIOGNOMY. sally understood, that I need but mention them ; and in doing so, I shall follow my arrangement of the organs. A person in whom the locomotive organs predominate, is of what is called the Muscular temperament; and if this class of organs prevails largely over the others, the individual will have long, powerful, and brawny limbs, and be correspondingly more disposed to exercises of the body than of the mind. This temperament forms what is called “ a fine man” by the ladies, and constitutes beauty of the locomotive system. The statues of Hercules, and of the gladiators, and our grenadier guards, belong to this class. The vital organs comprise two species of temperament, according as the blood-vessels or lymphatic vessels are in excess, ' the first constitutes the Sanguine, the other the Phlegmatic, temperament, and in these, but most strikingly in the latter, the limbs are shorter, and the trunk fuller, than in the preceding temperament, with a less or greater tendency to corpulency. The Sanguine temperament, as the conventional use of the term implies, gives the disposition quickness and versatility, to passionate but mutable vehemence of mind. While in the Phlegmatic temperament there is just an opposite disposition, with a sturdy propensity to the indulgence of the “good old” functions of eating, and drinking, and sleeping. In the last of the three classes the mental organs and nerves predominate ;—this is the natural Nervous temperament, denoted by the expanded brain, the well-developed organs of the senses, and usually the rigid, diminutive body. This is the temperament of genius ; in this the soul has been finely said, “ To o’er-inform its tenement of clay.” All those truly great men who have moved the world by dint of pure intellect alone, (for they are commonly puny in bodily powers,) will be found to have belonged to this species of temperament. There are acquired conditions of the body called the Bilious, and Melancholic, which have been improperly considered by some as primary temperaments; they are but mixtures of the other temperaments. Indeed one temperament is rarely found so notably predominant as to merit the epithet “ unmixed and when this is the case it is obviously unnatural, and may be almost considered in the light of a disease. And occasionally the three classes of organs are so equally compounded as to render the temperament indeterminate; but most commonly one system sufficiently predominates to stamp it. In strongly marked cases the temperament is no doubt an in evitable condition, and “ grows with our growth, and strengthens with our strengthbut, in the majority, it is in some
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=