otherwise they would not get a husband." Had Grosse allowed his imagination to paint a particular instance, he would have seen how grotesque his inference is. A favorite way among the Eskimo of securing a bride is, we are told, to drag her from her tent by the hair. This young woman, moreover, has never washed her face, nor does any man object to her filth. Yet we are asked to believe that an Eskimo could be so enamoured of the beauty of a few simple lines tattooed on a girl's dirty face that he would refuse to marry her unless she had them! Like other champions of the sexual selection theory, Grosse searches in the clouds for a comically impossible motive when the real reason lies right before his eyes. That reason is fashion. The tattoo marks are tribal signs (Bancroft, I., 48) which every girl must submit to have in obedience to inexorable custom, unless she is prepared to be an object of scorn and ridicule all her life.

The tyranny of fashion in prescribing disfigurements and mutilations is not confined to savages. The most amazing illustration of it is to be found in China, where the girls of the upper classes are obliged to this day to submit to the most agonizing process of crippling their feet, which finally, as Professor Flower remarks in his book on Fashion and Deformity, assume "the appearance of the hoof of some animal rather than a human foot." There is a popular delusion that the Chinese approve of such deformed small feet because they consider them beautiful-a delusion which Westermarck shares (200). Since the Chinese consider small feet "the chief charm of women," it might be supposed, he says, that the women would at least have the pleasure of fascinating men by a "beauty" to acquire which they have to undergo such horrible torture; "but Dr. Stricker assures us that in China a woman is considered immodest if she shows

her artificially distorted feet to a man. It is even improper to speak of a woman's foot, and in decent pictures this part is always concealed under the dress." To explain this apparent anomaly Westermarck assumes that the object of the concealment is to excite through the unknown!" To such fantastic nonsense does the doctrine of sexual selection

lead. In reality there is no reason for supposing that the Chinese consider crippled feet-looking like "the hoof of an animal"—beautiful any more than mutilations of other parts of the body. In all probability the origin of the custom of crippling women's feet must be traced to the jealousy of the men, who devised this procedure as an effective way of preventing their wives from leaving their homes and indulging in amorous intrigues; other practices with the same purpose being common in Oriental countries. In course of time the foot-binding became an inexorable fashion which the foolishly conservative women were more eager to continue than the men. All accounts agree that the anti-foot-binding movement finds its most violent and stubborn opponents in the women themselves. The Missionary Review for July, 1899, contains an article summing up a report of the Tien Tsu Hui, or "Natural Foot Society," which throws a bright light on the whole question and from which I quote as follows:

"The male members of a family may be opposed to the maiming of their female relatives by the senseless custom, but the women will support it. One Chinese even promised his daughter a dollar a day to keep her natural feet, and another, having failed with his older girls, arranged that his youngest should be under his personal supervision night and day. The one natural-footed girl was sought in marriage for the dollars that had been faithfully laid by for her. But at her new home she was so ridiculed by the hundreds who came to see her-and her feet-that she lost her reason. The other girl also became insane as a result of the persecutions which she had to endure."

Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women's desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous passion of the men by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by the other women, slaves of fashion all. These same motives are the source of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europe and America. Théophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense of beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers and missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between fashion and esthetics, anthropological literature

would be the poorer by hundreds of "false facts" and ludicrous inferences.1

The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has its sources in vanity and envy. This accounts for the extremes to which mutilations and fashions often go among both civilized and uncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be described in detail in the next paragraph. Few of our rich women wear their jewels because of their intrinsic beauty. They wear them for the same reason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they can get. In Mariner's book on the Tongans (Chap. XV.) there is an amusing story of a chief's daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe. Being asked why, she replied that her great desire was to amass a large quantity of beads and then return to Tonga, "because in England beads are so common that no

The advocates of the sexual selection theory might have avoided many grotesque blunders had they possessed a sense of humor to counterbalance and control their erudition. The violent opposition of Madagascar women to King Radama's order that the men should have their hair cut, to which Westermarck refers (174-75), surely finds in the proverbial stupid conservatism of barbarous customs a simpler and more rational explanation than in his assumption that this riot illustrated "the important part played by the hair of the head as a stimulant of sexual passion" (to these coarse, masculine women, who had to be speared before they could be quieted). An argument which attributes to unwashed, vermin-covered savages a fanatic zeal for what they consider as beautiful, such as no civilized devotee of beauty would ever dream of, involves its own reductio ad absurdum by proving too much. Westermarck also cites (177) from a book on Brazil the story that if a young maiden of the Tapoyers "be marriageable, and yet not courted by any, the mother paints her with some red color about the eyes," and in accordance with his theory we are soberly expected to accept this red paint about the eyes as an effective "stimulant of sexual passion," in case of a girl whose appearance otherwise did not tempt men to court her! The obvious object of the paint was to indicate that the girl was in the market. In other words, it was part of that language of signs which had such a remarkable development among some of the uncivilized races (see Mallery's admirable treatises on Indian Pictographs, taking up hundreds of pages in two volumes of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington). Belden relates (145) of the Plains Indians that a warrior who is courting a squaw asually paints his eyes yellow or blue, and the squaw paints hers red. He even knew squaws go through the painful operation of reddening the eyeballs, which he interprets as resulting from a desire to fascinate the men; but it is much more likely that it had some special significance in the language of courtship, probably as a mark of courage in enduring pain, than that the inflamed eye itself was considered beautiful. Belden himself further points out that a red stripe drawn horizontally from one eye to the other, means that the young warrior has seen a squaw he could love if she would reciprocate his attachment," and on p. 144 he explains that when a warrior smears his face with lampblack and then draws zigzags with his nails, it is a sign that he desires to be left alone, or is trapping, or melancholy, or in love." I had intended to give a special paragraph to Decorations as Parts of the Language of Signs, but desisted on reflecting that most of the foregoing facts relating to war, mourning, tribal, etc., decorations, really came under that head.

one would admire me for wearing them, and I should not have the pleasure of being envied." Bancroft (I., 128) says of the Kutchin Indians: "Beads are their wealth, used in the place of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves with necklaces and strings of various patterns." Referring to the tin ornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has "counted as many as sixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar"; while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they "deck themselves with an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. Quantity rather than quality is aimed at."

PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION

Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so far in this long chapter, assume that savages and barbarians have no esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. I believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty may exist even among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is little more than a childish pleasure in bright and lustrous shells and other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility (language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to esthetics-that is, the love of beauty for its own sake. Such a germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty; and this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration of personal beauty is not one of the motives. which induce a savage to marry a particular girl or man; for most of the "decorations" described in the preceding pages are not elements of personal beauty at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or mutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts that these "decorations" do

not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous passion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-esthetically and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show, much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve among the lower races as a stimulant of sexual passion. This we should expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or figures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows that nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even pretty faces; but these are not appreciated. Galton told Darwin that he saw in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but they were not attractive to the natives. Zöller saw at least one beautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of the Brazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago (354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautiful figures when young-every joint and limb well turned. But as we shall see presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, as among savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty. Ugliness, whether natural or inflicted by fashion, does not among these races act as a bar to marriage. "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex," we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272): "It is strength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; and to be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman he may choose for a wife." Belden found that the squaws were valued "only for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is taken of their personal beauty," etc., etc. Nor can the fact that savages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regard for personal beauty. Such children are put out of the way for the simple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or the tribe.

Advocates of the sexual selection theory make much ado over the fact that in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color and features-black, red, or yellow, flat noses,