(3 of 3)
A woman of type 442 is one of nature's practical jokes. In youth she is generally an active, slender pep girl with the endomorphic 4 concealed. After maturity that component blossoms out and she gets chubby. Sometimes a girl of this type, in her streamlined adolescence, chooses a career as a dancer. It might save years of wasted effort if she could be dissuaded by constitutional diagnosis and prediction of her future dimensions.
Temperament. As in physique, Sheldon also finds three components of temperament: viscerotonic, somatotonic, cerebrotonic. The extreme viscerotonic "radiates comfort. He participates easily in social gatherings and makes people feel at home. . . . His joys and sorrows he communicates to others."
The extreme somatotonic is "an active, energetic person . . . addicted to exercise and relatively immune to fatigue. He walks assertively, talks noisily, behaves aggressively. . . ." In youth he looks older than he is. "He is concerned mostly with affairs of the moment and meets his problems with some form of activity."
The extreme cerebrotonic is introverted, inhibited, unable to "let go" easily. He is likely to have allergies, skin trouble, chronic fatigue, insomnia. "He is sensitive to noise and distractions. He is not at home in social gatherings and he shrinks from crowds. He meets his troubles by seeking solitude."
These three components are mixed in various proportions in different people, and they seem to correlate, roughly but by no means exactly, with the endomorphic, mesomorphic and ectomorphic physical components, in that order. The nature and degree of the correspondence, and its interplay with environmental factors, says Sheldon, are questions for the future.
It seems likely that the amount of any one physical component, singly considered, is far less important to temperament than are balances and ratios among all three. For example, the body types 514 and 541 both have the same amount of endomorphic roundness, but the other two components, the strong and the frail, are reversed. So the 514 is a "long-legged, round-shouldered, completely soft and effeminate boy," whereas the 541 is a "ruddy, powerful, active, barrel-bodied boy who is usually full of bounding energy and is likely to become president of something."
*Caesar distrusted Cassius because he had a "lean and hungry look."