Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/884

802, like those on the Buddhist monuments. Among the aborigines of the Marquesas Islands the tattooing exhibits, on the women, designs of every sort: boots, gloves, bows, suns, and lines drawn with remarkable fineness and perfection; on the men, animals—sharks, crabs, lizards, snakes—or plants, or geometrical figures. Here tattooing constitutes real works of art.

Sometimes tattooing and mutilation are combined, as in the famous chiefs' heads of New Zealand, which are overloaded with curved lines, with deep incisions showing as hollows, and with dark colors, with the intervals colored with dotted tattooing that gives the skin a bluish tinge. These curved lines spare no part of the face, and are closer and more numerous, according to the fame of the bearer of them as a warrior, or the antiquity of the origin of his chiefly dignity. The tattooing of the New Zealanders has found an unanticipated use in their relations with Europeans. Thus, the missionaries having bought a tract of land, the facial tattoo patterns of the vendor were drawn at the bottom of the deed, to serve as his signature.

The skins of all the grand chiefs of Guinea are in effect damascened. In New Zealand tattooing forms a sort of coat of arms. The common people are not allowed to practice it; and the chiefs are not permitted to decorate themselves with certain marks till they have accomplished some great enterprise. Toupes, an intelligent New Zealander, who was brought to London a few years ago, insisted upon a photographer taking pains to bring out his tattoo marks well. "Europeans," he said, "write their names with a pen; Toupes writes his this way. No matter," he said also to Dumont d'Urville, "if the Chonqui are more powerful than I, they can not wear the lines on their foreheads, for my family is more illustrious than theirs." The ancient Thracians and the Picts distinguished their chiefs by their special tattooing. The Pagas of Sumatra add a new color every time they have killed an enemy.

Tattooing is the true writing of savages, their first registry of civil condition. Some tattoo marks indicate the obligation of the debtor to serve his creditor for a certain time. The number and nature of objects received are likewise indicated (Krausen,Ueber die Tatouiren, 1873).

Nothing is more natural than to see a usage so widespread among savages and prehistoric peoples reappear in classes which, as the deep-sea bottoms retain the same temperature, have preserved the customs and superstitions, even to the hymns, of the primitive peoples, and who have, like them, violent passions, a blunted sensibility, a puerile vanity, long-standing habits of inaction, and very often nudity. There, indeed, among savages, are he principal models of this curious custom.