Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/623

 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RACE-PREJUDICE 605

It is seldom that one meets a Dyak with hairs on his face. If they are present, it is only a few straggling ones as a moustache, or on the chin. I do not say they are unable to obtain that facial ornament ; but the women abhor a beard and the men, to please them, pluck out with a pair of pincers the few hairs that grow on the face, as soon as they appear. 1

The Chaymas are almost without beard on the chin, like the Tungouses, and other nations of the Mongol race. They pluck out the few hairs which appear ; but independently of that practice, most of the natives would be nearly beardless. 2

The value assigned [among the Anglo-Saxons] to hair was proportionately very high, the loss of the beard being estimated at 20 shillings, while the breaking of a thigh was fixed at only twelve. 3

The modifications and deformations of physical features practiced by the natural races are on the same mental principle as the deformations of fashion among the civilized and the practice of breeding for a particular type among herdsmen. I have already pointed out that the natural conformation of the female figure is attractive because femaleness is so, and fashion brings the characteristic points of the figure into prominence. It is probable also that the race has been bred toward a type in which the secondary sexual characters are prominent by the preference of men for women possessing in a remarkable way these "points of beauty." In the same way a stock of animals is improved by selecting for reproduction those marks of the breed which have already become so prominent and character- istic as to interest the breeder. Following the same law of attention and interest, different human races seek to make more prominent the characteristic racial marks.

The foreheads of the Mexican races are all very low, and their painters and sculptors even exaggerated this peculiarity, to make the faces they depicted more beautiful, so producing an effect which to us Europeans seems hideously ugly, but which is not more unnatural than the ideal type of beauty we see in the Greek statues. 4

This extraordinary plainness is to be found among nations to whom the means of producing artificial deformity are totally unknown, as is proved by the crania of the Mexican Indians, Peruvians, and Atures brought over by

1 BOCK, The Head- Hunters of Borneo, p. 183.

"HuMBOLDT, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 308.

3LUBBOCK, Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., p. 480.

4 TYLOR, Anahuac, p. 230.