Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/542

524 largest possible fist. To make it large, they swaddle the arms, which consequently remain slender, while the fist enlarges in a fashion very repulsive to our European eyes.

But the head seems to have been, by preference, the object of these strange caprices, probably because it is the part of the body most evident and most important. Some people seek to change completely the form of the cranium. For this purpose they place on the heads of children, immediately after birth, contrivances which project them forward or backward, and then, by pressing tightly behind and before, the head is made flat. There is a people on the western side of America which surrounds the head of the infant with a bandage so as to give it the form of a sugar-loaf.

I must remind you that among ourselves the ears are still pierced to suspend ornaments from them. If men have generally renounced this fashion, women remain very faithful to it. But all the other parts of the visage have been submitted to the same mutilations, the nose, the lips, the cheeks themselves have been pierced, always to suspend or introduce into the openings some morsel of wood, of stone, of bone, as ornament.

The face and the forehead are frequently decorated with divers tattooings (Figs. 7 and 8), made sometimes by pricking, sometimes by cutting the skin. At the Marquesas Isles, not only the countenance, but the entire body, is tattooed. You see here a warrior (Fig. 9) of that country, and perhaps you think him covered with a motley costume; no, it is simply tattooing.

Jest not too much at these ornaments of savages. Our ancestors wore the same, and the fashion is not wholly effaced with us. More