Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/59

Rh consistency may be observed in the practice of ladies keeping the glove on in shaking hands, while men very commonly remove it. When a knight's glove was a steel gauntlet, such a distinction would be reasonable enough.

This may indeed be fanciful. The practice of women having the head covered in church belongs to the earliest period of Christianity, and the reasons for adopting it were clearly specified. And the usage of men praying with the head uncovered, may have been an intentional reversal of the practice of covering the head in offering sacrifice among the Romans, and among the Jews in their prayers then and now. It does not seem to have been universal, and is even now not followed in the Coptic and Abyssinian churches, in which the Semitic custom of uncovering not the head but the feet is still kept up. This latter ceremony is of high antiquity, and may be plausibly explained as having been done at first merely for cleanliness, as it is now among the Moslems in their baths and houses, as well as in their mosques, that the ground may not be defiled.

There are, moreover, a number of practices found in different parts of the world, which throw doubt on these off-hand explanations of the customs of uncovering the head and feet, and would almost lead us to include both, as particular cases of a general class of reverential uncoverings of the body. Saul strips off his clothes to prophesy, and lies down so all that day and night. Tertullian speaks against the practice of praying with cloaks laid aside, as the heathen do. There was a well-known custom in Tahiti, of uncovering the body down to the waist in honour of gods or chiefs, and even in the neighbourhood of a temple, and on the sacred ground set apart for royalty, with which may be classed a very odd ceremony, which was performed before Captain Cook on his first visit to the island.

The regulations concerning the fow or turban in the Tonga Islands are very curious, from their partial resemblance to European usages. The turban, Mariner says, may only be worn by warriors going to battle, or at sham fights, or at night-time by