DRESS AND ADORNMENT. 787 



At last, the family liad to return to England ; and, although 

 there were not many human friends to take leave of, " there were 

 plenty of good-byes to be said ; for those who live on these out-of- 

 the-way farms come to be on very intimate and familiar terms 

 with their live stock ; and all our creatures even the fowls, and 

 those tamer members of our large family of ostriches which for 

 years had been daily looking inquiringly in at our windows, and 

 picking and stealing round the kitchen door were very old 

 friends, from whom we were sorry to part." Strange to say, the 

 animals the parting with which excited the least painful feeling 

 were the horses. The independence and freedom of their lives 

 make them indifferent to human society, and there grows up none 

 of that fellowship with them that is universal between Europeans, 

 Asiatics, and American Indians and their horses. 



DRESS AND ADORNMENT. 



II. DRESS. 

 By Prof. FREDERICK STARR. 



WHY has dress been developed ? We answer at once, to 

 serve as a covering to the body. But, if we think over the 

 matter a moment, we shall see that three different motives may 

 have operated : 



1. The desire for ornament. 



2. The wish to protect one's self against weather and harm. 



3. The feeling of shame. 



Dress may, then, be a decoration, a protection, a covering. All 

 three of these motives have no doubt acted, but we believe the 

 first has been the earliest and most powerful. 



Were modesty and the feeling of shame the only factors in 

 urging on dress development we should expect to find no naked 

 races ; there should be an inflexible rule as to what constitutes 

 modesty, and covering should always be more important than dis- 

 play. In reality we find the opposite of all these. " What is ne- 

 cessary is always less important than luxury." Ornament is never 

 lacking clothing often is. Peschel has somewhat fully discussed 

 this matter of nakedness and shame. He tells us that there are 

 tribes who, when first discovered, lived naked. Among those he 

 names are Australians, Andamanese, some White Nile tribes, the 

 red Soudanese, Bushmen, Guanches, some Guianians, Coronados, 

 and the Botocudos. All these people, dwelling in a state of nu- 

 dity, seemed to have no idea of shame on that account. The feel- 

 ing of shame for nudity is not then universal, nor have we any 

 reason to believe that it ever was. 



