Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/505

Rh certain woman of the Nile tribes told Sir Samuel Baker that Lady Baker should have had her four lower incisor teeth knocked out and her lower lip pierced for a quartz labret—"by that she would become very beautiful." Thus we see, while all tribes have some ideal of beauty, it is an ideal which varies infinitely, and which has grown up among the tribes independently. All desire to attain to the ideal after it has once been established; and Tylor tells us that for this reason Hottentot mothers manipulate the baby's nose to make it more snub, while Persian mothers try to make it aquiline. In many cases, as we shall see, simple manipulation is not enough, and more heroic measures are taken to produce the desired effect.

Looking over the whole field of ethnology, we find a wonderful variety of curious deformations, mutilations, and modifications which are considered beautiful. Of these we shall describe a considerable number, commenting upon some as we mention them, and then shall try to draw from them some general principles of importance. For convenience, we shall group all bodily changes made for the sake of increasing personal beauty into four groups: 1. Perforations and filings. 2. Bandagings. 3. Color decorations, etc. 4. Hair-dressing.

First, then, as to perforations and filings—or mutilations. Many parts of the body are mutilated, either in order to make them serve as carriers of ornaments, as direct improvement of personal beauty, or for some useful end. The lips easily lend themselves to such an operation, and pierced lips are found in South America, in Africa and in the extreme Northwest of North America. The custom of piercing the lips in the past was also widely spread. The standard example is, of course, the Botocudo of South America, whose name comes from the Portuguese word for a plug, referring to the ornament inserted in the opening. These people wear, in lips and in ears, great circular disks, sometimes of hard and heavy wood, weighing even a quarter of a pound. This lip-plug drags the lip down to a horizontal position.Flower quotes Dampier as saying, in 1681, of the Corn Islanders, off the Mosquito Coast: "They have a fashion to cut holes in the lips of the boys when they are young, close to the chin, which they keep open with little plugs till they are fourteen or fifteen years old. They then wear beards in them, made of turtle or tortoise shell. The little notch at the upper end they put in through the lip, where it remains between the lips and the teeth; the under part hangs down over their chin; this they commonly wear all day, and when they sleep they take it out. They have likewise holes bored in their ears, both men and women when young, and by constant stretching with great pegs they grow to be as big as milled five-shilling pieces. Herein they wear pieces of wood, cut