Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/883

Rh, and color their warriors with Isatis tinctoria (woad) to render them more terrible on the field of battle."

I do not believe there is a single savage people that does not tattoo more or less. The Payaguns painted their faces in blue on feast days, in triangles and arabesques. The various negro tribes distinguished themselves from one another, especially the tribes of Bambaras, by horizontal or vertical lines traced on the face, the chest, and arms. Kafir warriors have the privilege of decorating their legs with a long azure line, which they are able to make indelible.

In Tahiti the women tattoo only the feet and hands or the ear, tracing collars or bracelets; the men, the whole body, on the hairy skin, on the nose, and the gums; and they often produce inflammations and gangrene, especially on the fingers and the gums. On the Marquesas Islands tattooing is a custom as well as a sacrament. Beginning at the age of fifteen or sixteen years, they put a girdle upon the young people and tattoo their fingers and legs, but always in a sacred place. Women, even princesses, have no right to tattoo anything but their hands and feet; grand personages cover their whole body; and while the designs on the lower part are delicate, those on the face lend it a grotesque and horrible aspect, so that enemies may be struck with fear. At Nukahiva, noble ladies are permitted to wear more numerous tattoo marks than the women of the people.

In Samoa, widows, it seems, tattoo the tongue; men paint the body from the girdle to the knees. The bald heads of old men in the Marquesas Islands may be seen covered with tattoo marks.

The fashionable ladies of Bagdad stained their temples and lips with azure, drew circles and rays of the same color on their legs, painted a blue girdle round their waists, and surrounded each of their breasts with a crown of blue flowers.

Tattooing is practiced in Polynesia at the age of from eleven to thirteen years; and is to these natives what the toga pretexta was to young Romans. In the Marquesas Islands it serves as a kind of clothing to the men; they might be mistakenly supposed to be covered with armor. Their face is hidden under the marks. The women here are generally but little tattooed, but coquettes wear the marks on their feet, hands, arms, legs, and forearms—designs so delicate that they might be taken for stockings and gloves in the daytime.

In order to please the women and to be able to find a wife, writes Délisle, the Laotian should be tattooed from the navel to below the calf, all round the thigh; while among the Dyacks the women submit to the operation in order to get husbands. Laotian tattooing is very animated, and represents fantastic