We prove variants of Schwarz's lemma involving monotonicity properties of condenser capacity and inner radius. Also, we examine when a similar monotonicity property holds for the hyperbolic metric.

An infinite family of perfect, non-extremal Riemann surfaces is constructed, the first examples of this type of surfaces. The examples are based on normal subgroups of the modular group $\PSL(2,{\sf Z})$ of level $6$. They provide non-Euclidean analogues to the existence of perfect, non-extremal positive definite quadratic forms. The analogy uses the function {\it syst\/} which associates to every Riemann surface $M$ the length of a systole, which is a shortest closed geodesic of $M$.