CHINS AND CHARACTER.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XV, Issue 886, 28 February 1907, Page 21

CHINS AND CHARACTER.

Dr. Louis Robinson, writing in Blackwood’s Magazine on this subject, rather knocks on the head the old notion that a strongly developed chin necessarily means a strongly developed will. At least, we must modify, if not upset, our notions. The chin, of course, is a distinctively human characteristic. What is not generally recognised about it, however, is how much it may be modified by the nature of the food taken. In the case of the primi-

tive savage, for instance, the shape of rhe jaw is generally influenced by the extremely hard work his teeth have to do in masticating coarse food, just in the same way as a blacksmith’s arm and collarbone become almost abnormally developed by striking his anvil. Until recently sailors have had to live on “hard tack” —food which gave them much severe chewing to do—and consequently “one never sees a sailor with a weak jaw.” Some years ago the writer had to pass a number of boys from a London parish district for the navy. From time to time these lads revisited their old homes, and the most noticeable change in them, especially when contrasted with their companions who had never left the streets, was, next to their taller stature and healthier appearance, “the total change in the shape and expression of their faces. On analysing this, one found that it was to be mainly accounted for by the increased growth and improved angle of the lower jaw. The fact that so many otherwise pleasing young faces nowadays are marred by a certain weakness in the outline of the jaw is due, Dr. Robinson thinks, probably to our elaborately-prepared food, needing so little mastication; and he wonders that none of the clever “beauty specialists” have ever seized on this fact and made capital out of it. A weak mouth is certainly not a beauty. Whether a square jaw denotes laudable strength of character or mere “pig-headedness” depends on the presence or absence of certain brain cells, those necessary for the manifestation of other mental and moral faculties, quite distinct from the nervous mechanism of the strong will.