Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/586

570 as from southern Asia. These may prove to be simply coincidences of expression of peoples of corresponding mental development brought about by corresponding natural surroundings and conditions.

Photographing Savages.—A lively use of the camera is recommended by Mr. E. F. Im Thurn as a means of getting representations of savages in their real life. The usual illustrations in works of anthropology and travel, when they are not merely physiological pictures, are pronounced by him almost universally bad. "Of old, the book illustrator, if, as was usual, he was not himself the traveler, drew as pictures of primitive folk merely the men and women that surrounded him, figures of men and women of his own stage of civilization, and merely added to these such salient features as he was able, from the traveler's tales, to fancy that his supposed primitive subject had. . . . The modern anthropological illustrator does indeed generally draw from photographs, but almost always from photographs taken under non-natural conditions." They are either taken in town, where the savage is away from his usual haunts and in unaccustomed surroundings; or the mere thought that he is being photographed puts him under constraint. "That to gain the confidence of uncivilized folk whom you wish to photograph is one of quite the most essential matters you will easily understand. The first time I tried to photograph a red man was among the mangrove trees at the mouth of the Barima River. My red-skinned subject was poised high up on a mangrove root. He sat quite still while focused and drew the shutter. Then, as I took off the cap, with a moan he fell backward off his perch on to the soft sand below him. Nor could he by any means be persuaded to prepare himself once more to face the unknown terrors of the camera. A very common thing to happen, and to foil the efforts of the photographer at the very moment when he has but to withdraw and to replace the cap, is for the timid subject suddenly to put up his hand to conceal his face, a proceeding most annoying to the photographer, but interesting to the anthropologist, as illustrating the very widespread dread of primitive folk of having their features put on paper, and thus being submitted spiritually to the power of any possessing the picture. . . . A curious instance may be mentioned of the discovery, thanks to the camera, of that rather rare thing—a personal idiosyncrasy among red men. Some time last year in photographing a number of Carib lads I noticed that one of them at the moment of the taking of the picture suddenly put up his hands and put them, not over his face, but one on each shoulder. The attitude struck me at once as an unusual one, but yet it seemed to me in some way familiar. Some time after, in looking through my old stock of negatives, I found one which showed a much younger Carib lad in the same unusual attitude, and it was only after some inquiry that I realized that this last-named negative was one which I had taken some years before of the same boy." There is a field here for the use of some of the "snap" instruments.

The Reasons of Conventionalities.—Conventionalities are treated by the London Spectator as things which must grow up with the growth of civilization, yet which, while they are not to be despised, are no more to be exalted into absolute and universal obligations. Even on matters affecting merely the external order and harmony of life, there are conventions which, though not intended to repress and exclude all overflow of individual genius, are still of great value in controlling the arbitrary eccentricities of individual nature, and in reducing men's manners and modes of expression to terms which one might speak of as commensurable with the manners and modes of expression of those who live with them in the same moral atmosphere. The mere beauty of any social life depends on the conformity of all—within variable but definite limits—to conventions, which, though by no means of supreme obligation, yet render the give-and-take of life much more natural and gentle and easy than if each man or woman were to blurt out the feeling uppermost in the individual mind, without any of that toning-down and softening which exclude abrupt and noisy explosions of individual self-will. Not all social conventions are beautiful. Sometimes the artificiality of them exceeds whatever is either necessary or advantageous for the