This is interesting, the author see's something self reflective in the lice and thus does not feel any hatred towards them despite the inconvenience they must cause. This got me thinking about how often people look at the world as things that are less than, equal to, or greater than themselves and this impacts the level of empathy with which we approach these things. However that scale is impacted by many self defined things such as our self view and what qualities or standards we value, instead of the actual actions or existence of the thing that we are judging.

In this section the author is saying that beautiful images incite a reaction within us, or a "song", but by this standard things need not be necessarily pretty in order to illicit a reaction. Many jarring unsightly thing could be considered beautiful under this standard. The author seems to carry this idea throughout the work, at first I thought he would use poetic flowery language or vague insinuation to cover up criminals or vulgarity and make them sound beautiful. However, the author states even the most unattractive details still describing them as beautiful, not veiling the truth from the reader but trying to describe his own viewpoint?

This is interesting, I think current facial recognition technology uses 80 (?). nodal points on the face, I wonder how these measurements compare to the 11 measurements Bertillion began with.

Looking back, the idea that outward physical features could indicated personality traits seems absurd, however we still seem to do this subconsciously now a days. The study I found, linked below, looked into appearance in relation to occupational stress and found that since photojournalism was widely used in elections (1888), 81% of elections resulted in the tallest presidential candidate winning. Height is frequently been associate with authority, much like cranium size was associated with mental capacity in phrenology. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235365107_Evolution_Appearance_and_Occupational_Success