742 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Bongo negro, the lip dragged down by the heavy plug and the ears dis- * 

 tended by huge disks of wood are things of beauty, that the Malay 

 prefers teeth that are black to those of the most pearly whiteness, that 

 the Western Indian despises the form of a head not flattened down 

 like a pancake, or elongated like a sugar-loaf, and then let us carefully 

 ask ourselves whether we are sure that in leaving nature as a standard 

 of the beautiful, and adopting a purely conventional criterion, we are 

 not falling into an error exactly similar to that of all these people 

 whose tastes we are so ready to condemn. 



The fact is that, in admiring such distorted forms as the constricted 

 waist and symmetrically pointed foot, we are simply putting ourselves 

 on a level in point of taste with those Australians, Botocudos, and 

 negroes. We are taking fashion, and nothing better, higher, or truer, 

 for our guide ; and, after the various examples brought forward this 

 evening, may I not well ask 



" Seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is ? " 







COOPERATION" m ENGLAND. 



Br GEORGE ILES. 



AT the Cooperative Congress, held in Newcastle-on-Tyne, last May, 

 some very interesting statistics were presented. The latest re- 

 port of the Registrar is for 1878, and shows the membership of Brit- 

 ish cooperative societies to have been 560,703, having transacted dur- 

 ing the year business amounting to $102,820,000. In 1861 the first 

 year of the reports published by the Registrar the membership was 

 48,184, with a business for that year of $7,360,000. This remarkable 

 growth of cooperation within recent years has brought it from the 

 obscurity of a theory, held by the general public to be either imprac- 

 ticable altogether, or practicable only within special and narrow limits, 

 to the importance of a power which is transforming in appreciable 

 measure the entire retail trade of Great Britain, and which, at the last 

 election, had aroused an antagonism which excluded from Parliament 

 two well-known publicists of high character and ability. 



The cooperative movement, as far as it has gone, has been chiefly 

 directed toward so improving the ordinary methods of retail trade as 

 to confer moral benefit and material profit upon the working-classes. 

 The wastes of our present plans of retail distribution are very obvi- 

 ous : our streets swarm with inconsiderable shops, repetitions of one 

 another, and maintained at an enormous aggregate expense. Compe- 

 tition has far exceeded the bounds within which it does good, by spur- 

 ring industry and inciting emulation ; without regard to the strictly 



