It would appear once more that Victor has read and inculcated the wisdom of one of
his most celebrated countrymen in the eighteenth century, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801),
whose Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-1778)—translated into English in 1789-1798 as
Essays on Physiognomy— purported to show how character could be inferred from facial
features and proportions. Here "open" carries moral connotations, indicative of the
"frankness of disposition" with which this sentence ends. See I:3:1 and note for an
earlier instance where physiognomy appears to enter into his discourse.

Mary Shelley was aware that her own character had been predicted from her infant physiognomy
by her father's close friend, the scientist William Nicholson.

Nicholson (1753-1815), from an initial meeting in 1786, became one of William Godwin's
closest friends, a major influence on the conception of his Enquiry concerning Political
Justice, and his source during more than a quarter-century for up-to-date knowledge
in the sciences. He and his wife were among the most attentive of friends during the
fatal illness of Mary Wollstonecraft. On the infant Mary Godwin's nineteenth day,
Godwin persuaded Nicholson to write a lengthy prediction of his daughter's character
based on her physiognomy, according to the system popularized by Lavater.

Nicholson's most important contribution to chemistry was the discovery of the process
of electrolysis of water, using the new advances in electricity developed by Alessandro
Volta and others. He discovered that the application of electrical currents to water
causes the water to break into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen — the first
chemical reaction produced by electricity.

In addition to being a practicing chemist, Nicholson was instrumental in propagating
knowledge in the field. His introduction to Natural Philosophy (1781) was widely known.
He founded The Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts in 1797, the
first scientific journal not under the aegis of a scientific institution. And in 1809,
he published the British Encyclopedia; or, Dictionary of arts and sciences. Comprising
an accurate and popular view of the present improved state of human knowledge in six
volumes, from which the extracts concerning galvanic experimentation in the first
decade of the nineteenth century, a process of which he was among the major exponents,
are invaluable. This consolidation of the contemporary scientific scene has long been
understood to have been instrumental in making Percy Bysshe Shelley "a Newton among
poets." What should be equally clear is that the acquaintance of Mary Shelley with
this remarkable man, thus begun in infancy, would have amply provided her with a theoretical
understanding of the scientific bases on which her novel purports to rest.

As Nicholson's account emphasizes (C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and
Contemporaries (London, 1876), pp. 289-90), she, too, possessed a "capacious forehead."

This is a first indication that women and men do not generally see eye to eye in this
novel. It will be replicated in Elizabeth's fears for the health and mental stability
of Victor Frankenstein, and, like that analogy, suggests that the domestic tranquillity
over which women conventionally preside is threatened by the sublime overreaching
of male ambition.

The language of necessity here is curious and seems indicative of Victor's almost
instinctive recourse to a sense of destiny to absolve himself of guilt. The theological
implications of this phrase are as serious as are those of the preceding paragraph,
and equally heretical.

Mary Shelley here unobtrusively introduces another key concern of the novel, often
invoked as "destiny," that broadly affects the self-conception both of individuals
and their surrounding social ambience. The concept often operates as a cover for personal
irresponsibility. Thus, wherever the word appears, the reader should be alert to the
contexts within which it is embedded and to the moral and ideological implications
of its employment.

The third of these martial virtues, firmness is likewise associated with the stance
of Satan in Paradise Lost. He opens the debate among the fallen angels in Book II
by asserting their democratic unity in opposition to God, twice calling attention
to its presumed stability through employing the adjective "firm":

     With this advantage, then
To union, and firm faith, and firm accord,
More than can be in Heaven, we now return
To claim our just inheritance of old.
-- II.35-38

Compare Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form
and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension
how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what
is this quintessence of dust?
-- Hamlet II.ii.312-17

God is the final cause, and Mary Shelley would have been well aware that a great many
people in England could purport to speak definitively on a subject from which Victor
backs skeptically away. Victor is perhaps remembering that Newton in his last years
wrote a two-volume commentary on the Book of Revelation, where the final cause, in
the conventional teaching of Christianity, is cryptically revealed. The secondary
and tertiary grades of causation would be, for example, the rationale behind the laws
of the universe enunciated with such clarity by Isaac Newton. An example closer to
the fictional point would be to understand why and how the Grand Unified Field operates,
since both Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton have been engaged in trying to fathom
isolated aspects of it. See I:L1:2 and note.

A word in late eighteenth-century physiology used to cover the nervous and lymphatic
networks and various filaments within the body.

As earlier at the trial (I:7:11), Victor's egocentricity impels him to assert his
prior claim as sufferer, even as he stands in the presence of the condemned innocent.
His grounds seem to be that Justine, although surely a victim of injustice, has the
integrity of her innocence to depend upon, whereas he, although powerless to alter
the verdict, knows the grounds of its falsehood and stands morally self-perjured and
divided.

The reader will detect here the first sign of a distance between father and son that
will recur at crucial points in their subsequent relationship.