Excerpt:
The first Essays on Physiognomy by the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater (1741 - 1801) were published in Germany in the late eighteenth century as: Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe, Leipzig and Winterthur, 1775 - 8. In French translation from 1806 - 9, and English from 1789, his Essays on Physiognomy went on to become one of the most influential books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.