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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



largest possible fist. To make it large, they swaddle the arms, which 

 consequently remain slender, while the fist enlarges in a fashion very 

 repulsive to our European eyes. 



But the head seems to have been, by preference, the object of these 

 strange caprices, probably because it is the part of the body most 

 evident and most important. Some people seek to change completely 

 the form of the cranium. For this j^urpose they place on the heads 

 of children, immediately after birth, contrivances which project them 

 forward or backward, and then, by pressing tightly behind and before, 

 the head is made flat. There is a people on the western side of America 

 which surrounds the head of the infant with a bandage so as to give 

 it the form of a sugar-loaf. 



I must remind you that among ourselves the ears are still pierced 

 to suspend ornaments from them. If men liave generally renounced 

 this fashion, women remain very faithful to it. But all the other parts 

 of the visage have been submitted to the same mutilations, the nose, 

 the lips, the cheeks themselves have been pierced, alw^ays to suspend 

 or introduce into the openings some morsel of wood, of stone, of bone, 

 as ornament. 



Fig. 7. Fig. 8. 



Head of New-Zealander. 



Head op New-Zealander. 



The face and the forehead are frequently decorated with divers tat- 

 tooings (Figs. V and 8), made sometimes by pricking, sometimes by 

 cutting the skin. At the Marquesas Isles, not only the countenance, 

 but the entire body, is tattooed. You see here a warrior (Fig. 9) of 

 that country, and perhaps you think him covered with a motley cos- 

 tume ; no, it is simply tattooing. 



Jest not too much at these ornaments of savages. Our ancestors 

 wore the same, and the fashion is not wholly efiaced with us. More 



