The Nose Ought to Have It The Royal Dental Hospital, it was revealed in these columns yesterday, has got the whip- hand over receding chins. Appliances have been invented, and a treatment has been evolved, which will disentangle your chin from your Adam's apple and send it shooting manfully into space, like the bows of some proud ship or the toe of a policeman's boot. This is very interest- ing news. There has somehow grown up among the white races a rooted contempt for the reced- ing chin. Conversely, a lower jaw which juts out like a bulldog's or a pike's is superstitiously revered not only on aesthetic but on moral grounds. What hero of fiction has ever had a receding chin ? Not one, in this country: not even one of the introspective sort. You might as well give your heroine a squint. Courage, resource, authority, decision-all these and many other sterling qualities are held to be embodied in such a jaw as (for instance) MR. JACK HULBERT possesses. Proconsuls are proverbially prognathous. A stiff upper lip is the corollary of a whacking great chin; but when we say that a man looks a spineless sort of creature it is ten to one we mean that he hasn't got much of a chin. The whole thing seems deplorably arbitrary. Why should the lower jaw be the yardstick of character ? Why not the nose, for a change ? Many a poor fellow whose chin is no more than a wistful lump in his throat has a perfectly splendid nose, sticking far out in front of his face, fair and large and resolute for all to see. Why should he automatically take second place to some pug-nosed prognathic ? The nose, after all, is a far more useful and important feature than the lower jaw. It is indeed difficult to see any point in having a chin at all. You cannot smell with your chin. You cannot balance spectacles upon it-at least you will look a fool if you do. There are in fact only two purposes that your chin can serve. One is to act as an essential point of contact between you and any persons who may wish to knock you insensible; the other is to be shaved. In neither of these capacities does your chin show to advantage. Nobody likes being knocked out; and only eccentrics enjoy shaving. Many men with receding chins-better known to the general public, perhaps, as opisthognathics- dislike shaving so much that they grow beards, beneath the luxuriance of which the dimensions of their lower jaws are securely and contemptu- ously hidden. Now here is another argument in favour of the nose. To grow a beard is to conceal a feature which the world, however mis- takenly, regards as an important index to character; and such concealment is apt to lead to misunderstandings and even to impostures. If it was the nose, that noble and ingenious pro- tuberance, to which we looked for symptoms of will power, resolution, and all the rest of it, we should never be misled; for nobody-with the possible but still doubtful exception of an Abominable Snowman-can grow a beard upon his nose. Up, therefore, with the nose, and let the lower jaw recede ! Let our ideal be the elephant and not the bulldog. The Nose Ought to Have It