The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6)

Chapter 54: CHAP. 51.—THE FACE, THE FOREHEAD, AND THE EYE-BROWS.

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The work assembles systematic observations on animals, insects, and trees, combining natural history with practical notes. It surveys insect forms and habits, including bees, silk‑producing worms, spiders, and parasitic species, and discusses reproduction, classification, diseases, and useful products like honey and silk. It then examines animal anatomy in detail, limb by limb and organ by organ, comparing organs, vital functions, and bodily peculiarities across species. Later sections catalogue trees and exotic plants, describing aromatic gums, spices, frankincense, myrrh, and methods for producing and testing unguents and perfumes, and noting their uses and regions of origin.

CHAP. 51.—THE FACE, THE FOREHEAD, AND THE EYE-BROWS.

Man is the only creature that has a face, the other animals having only a muzzle or a beak. Other animals have a forehead as well, but it is only on the forehead of man that is depicted sorrow, gladness, compassion, or severity. It is the forehead that is the index of the mind. Man has eyebrows, also, which move together or alternately; these, too, serve in some measure as indications of the feelings. Do we deny or do we assent, it is the eyebrows, mostly, that indicate our intentions. Feelings of pride may be generated elsewhere, but it is here that they have their principal abode; it is in the heart that they take their rise, but it is to the eyebrows that they mount, and here they take up their position. In no part of the body could they meet with a spot more lofty and more precipitous, in which to establish themselves free from all control.