EVOLUTION OF CEREMONIAL GOVERNMENT. 647 



as the tendency is to modify the injury inflicted, so that it shall in 

 the least degree diminish the slave's usefulness ; and as, with the rise 

 of a class born in slavery, the mark which the slave bears no longer 

 showing that he was taken in war, does not imply a victory achieved 

 by his owner there eventually remains no need for the mark to be 

 one involving a serious mutilation. Hence it is inferable that muti- 

 lations of the least injurious and least painful kinds will become the 

 commonest. Such, at any rate, seems a reasonable explanation of 

 the fact that cutting off of hair for propitiatory purposes is the most 

 prevalent of all mutilations. 



Already we have seen the probable origin of the custom among 

 the Feejeeans that tributaries had to make a propitiatory sacrifice of 

 their locks on approaching their great chiefs ; and there is evidence 

 that a kindred sacrifice made in homage was demanded of old in Brit- 

 ain. In the Arthurian legends, which, unhistoric as they may be, 

 yield good evidence respecting the manners of the times from which 

 they descend, we read (in Mr. Cox's abridgment) : " Then went Ar- 

 thur to Caerleon ; and thither came messengers from King Ryons, 

 who said : ' Eleven kings have done me homage, and with their beards 

 I have trimmed a mantle. Send me now thy beard, for there lacks 

 yet one to the finishing of my mantle.' " 



Some reasons exist for the belief that taking an enslaved captive's 

 hair began with the smallest practicable divergence from taking the 

 dead enemy's scalp ; for the part of the hair in some cases given in 

 propitiation, and in other cases worn subject to a master's ownership, 

 answers in position to the scalpdock. The hair yielded up by the 

 tributary Feejeeans was the tobe, a kind of pigtail the implication 

 being that this could be demanded by, and therefore belonged to, the 

 superior. Moreover, among the Calmucks, when one pulls another by 

 the pigtail, or actually tears it out, this is regarded as a punishable 

 offense, because the pigtail is thought to belong to the chief, or to be 

 a sign of subjection to him. If it is the short hair on the top of the 

 head that has been subjected to such treatment, it does not constitute 

 a punishable offense, because this is considered the man's own hair 

 and not that of the chief. And then I may add the statement of Wil- 

 liams, that the Tartar conquerors of China ordered the Chinese " to 

 adopt the national Tartar mode of shaving the front of the head, and 

 braiding the hair in a long cue, as a sign of submission." Another fact 

 presently to be given joins with these in suggesting that a vanquished 

 man, not killed, but kept as a slave, was allowed to wear his scalp- 

 lock on sufferance, the theory being that the victor might at any time 

 demand it. 



Be this as it may, however, the widely-pi-evalent custom of taking 

 the hair of the slain, either with or without a part of the skin, has 

 nearly everywhere resulted in the association between short hair and 

 slavery. This association existed among both Greeks and Romans : 



