DEESS AND ADORNMENT. 489 



certain woman of the Nile tribes told Sir Samuel Baker that 

 Lady Baker should have had her four lower incisor teeth knocked 

 out and her lower lip pierced for a quartz labret " by that she 

 would become very beautiful." Thus we see, while all tribes have 

 some ideal of beauty, it is an ideal which varies infinitely, and 

 which has grown up among the tribes independently. All desire 

 to attain to the ideal after it has once been established ; and Tylor 

 tells us that for this reason Hottentot mothers manipulate the 

 baby's nose to make it more snub, while Persian mothers try to 

 make it aquiline. In many cases, as we shall see, simple manipu- 

 lation is not enough, and more heroic measures are taken to pro- 

 duce the desired effect. 



Looking over the whole field of ethnology, we find a wonder- 

 ful variety of curious deformations, mutilations, and modifica- 

 tions which are considered beautiful. Of these we shall describe 

 a considerable number, commenting upon some as we mention 

 them, and then shall try to draw from them some general prin- 

 ciples of importance. For convenience, we shall group all bodily 

 changes made for the sake of increasing personal beauty into four 

 groups: 1. Perforations and filings. 2. Bandagings. 3. Color dec- 

 orations, etc. 4. Hair-dressing. 



First, then, as to perforations and filings or mutilations. 

 Many parts of the body are mutilated, either in order to make 

 them serve as carriers of ornaments, as direct improvement of 

 personal beauty, or for some useful end. The lips easily lend 

 themselves to such an operation, and pierced lips are found in 

 South America, in Africa and in the extreme Northwest of North 

 America. The custom of piercing the lips in the past was also 

 widely spread. The standard example is, of course, the Botocudo 

 of South America, whose name comes from the Portuguese word 

 for a plug, referring to the ornament inserted in the opening. 

 These people wear, in lips and in ears, great circular disks, some- 

 times of hard and heavy wood, weighing even a quarter of a 

 pound. This lip-plug drags the lip down to a horizontal position. - 

 Flower quotes Dampier as saying, in 1681, of the Corn Islanders, 

 off the Mosquito Coast : " They have a fashion to cut holes in the 

 lips of the boys when they are young, close to the chin, which they 

 keep open with little plugs till they are fourteen or fifteen years 

 old. They then wear beards in them, made of turtle or tortoise 

 shell. The little notch at the upper end they put in through the 

 lip, where it remains between the lips and the teeth ; the under 

 part hangs down over their chin ; this they commonly wear all 

 day, and when they sleep they take it out. They have likewise 

 holes bored in their ears, both men and women when young, and 

 by constant stretching with great pegs they grow to be as big as 

 milled five-shilling pieces. Herein they wear pieces of wood, cut 



YOL. XXXIX. 34 



