Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/506

490 very smooth and round, so that the ear seems to be all wood, with a little skin around it."

In ancient Mexico labrets were worn, and very pretty little ones made of black obsidian and finely polished are not uncommon. These are shaped like a stove-pipe hat, the brim being placed between the lip and the lower teeth, and the crown projecting from the middle of the chin. Such labrets, although usually of obsidian, are sometimes of jade, and were occasionally of large size. Curiously enough, this same style of lip-plug is found among the western Eskimos. Within a century the custom of piercing the lips for labrets was prevalent in Alaska and British 'Columbia. The ornaments were sometimes three inches long by one and a half wide, of an oval form, and hollowed into troughs above and below. In fact, it is said that the Ahts took out the labret and used it as a spoon in eating hot soups, etc. Among the Tlingits of Alaska the women only wore labrets. The girl's lip was pierced as she approached womanhood, and a very small peg inserted in the opening. This hole was enlarged by the insertion from time to time of ever larger labrets. Only women of great age and high position wore the largest ones. The practice is now falling into disuse, and large labrets are almost a thing of the past. Small pegs of silver are the customary form at present. In Africa labretifery is quite as common, and varies from tribe to tribe. The Loobah wear a polished cone of quartz, some worn by men being even two inches in length. Mittoo women wear circular plates (Fig. 1); the Bongo wear plugs in both upper and lower lips, and seem to delight in the noise made by the ornaments striking together. Schweinfurth, from whom most of these African examples are taken, says these same Bongo women wear bits of straw in holes at the edges of the nostrils, a clamp at the corner of the mouth, and numerous little iron rings in their ears. "Some of the women have the body pierced in little less than a hundred places." Nuehr women wear in the upper lip a small ornament of iron wire covered with beads, which at a little distance looks like a cigarette in the mouth. Yet more curious is the pelele worn by the Manganya women (Fig. 2). It is a ring, made of metal, ivory, or