Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/495

Rh performance between the low comedian and the soubrette on the stage is probably not immediately connected with the manners of Corea, where, according to H. St. John, "they have no salutations except buffeting each other." The latter may be likened to the proverbial Irish mode of courtship, or with more seriousness to the love-making of lions, where the pat of the paw is subversive.

In many hot regions, markedly in the New Hebrides and New Guinea, actually sprinkling water by the hand over the friend's head is the best expression of friendship. It was symbolized by canoe-men who, on approaching a vessel, sprinkled toward it the sea-water from their paddles, and the significance, if not otherwise known, would be made clear by the spoken words, meaning "May you be cool!" It becomes a question how closely this idea is connected with baptism, and how nearly the old gesture of the hand is preserved in those forms of benediction which are not immediately adopted from the figure of the cross.

In Arabia Petræa the cheeks are pressed together without the use of the lips or hands; and the Indians of Texas in 1685 were noticed to show affection by blowing against the ear. The Biluchi "embrace" by each laying hands alternately on both shoulders of the other. The mutual embrace of affection can not, however, properly be considered as a mere salutation, because it is a communion practiced wholly unconnected with meeting and parting, but it may explain the origin of some of the salutes made with personal contact. Yet certain reports of the occasion and manner of embraces seem to include them among true salutations—e. g., men of the Darling River, when friendly, "salute by standing side by side and casting each of them his nearer arm round his fellow's neck." This suggests the concept of union, though it is more commonly and more conveniently expressed by other actions.

When an Aino returns home after travel, he and his friend put their heads on each other's shoulders; the elder then lays his hand on the younger's head and strokes it down, gradually drawing his hands over the shoulders down the arms and to the tips of the younger's fingers. Until this has been done neither speaks a word. The description would apply to the usual mode of making hypnotic passes. A similar stroking is performed by the Blackf oot Indians of Canada to express gratification.

Other salutes of contact were symbolized by a pantomime in which actual contact was omitted. The Eskimos, as La Potherie told in 1753, "jumped, and rubbed their own stomachs," and the Ainos in informal society stroke their own flowing beards at a visitor, as if to signify, "Consider your beard, if you have any, to be duly stroked."