822 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ciple may be seen in the transformation of languages, through the 

 prevalence in certain classes of society of the affectation of pe- 

 culiar pronunciations. So the investigator, having discovered 

 and proved a fact, tries to generalize it and magnify its impor- 

 tance ; and sometimes he is able to make his contemporaries par- 

 ticipate in the error. Yet the exaggeration is occasionally justi- 

 fied, and then occurs one of those great discoveries that mark 

 new eras. 



I shall not go into all these questions, but shall examine sim- 

 ply the part played by exaggeration in our idea of the beautiful ; 

 nor shall I consider whether, as some philosophers believe, there 

 is an ideal of beauty — a beau ideal — outside of and above us, but 

 shall confine myself to the illustration of the conceptions of 

 beauty exhibited in the customs of the various races of men. 



When we look at the ornamentation of costumes, for instance, 

 and at devices for enhancing personal appearance, we find that 

 they have been carried so far as to provoke mutilations. The 

 negroes of Africa, strongly differentiated as they are from other 

 races, are prone to exaggerate the peculiarities of their physi- 

 ognomy. With lips already thick, some tribes stick thorns into 

 them to provoke irritation and cause them to swell out still far- 

 ther. The Wolowe women of the Senegal have learned to in- 

 crease the prognathism or projection forward of the upper jaw. 

 According to Faidherbe's description of the process, "as soon 

 as the girl child's first incisors have appeared, they are extracted 

 with a pair of pincers, and when the second begin to come out 

 they are forced by a continual action of the lower incisors and 

 the tongue into a forward direction." The negro women of the 

 shores of Lake Tanganyika, to make their breasts larger, cause 

 them to be stung by ants. The women of the Assinians of Guinea 

 are, according to Mondiere, still more ingenious. It is a sign of 

 beauty among them, he says, to have the largest possible nipples ; 

 and " children of five years, as well as larger ones, may be seen 

 hunting the nymphse of the Myrmidus fornarius and pulling at 

 their breasts while the insects bite them, to make them swell more 

 quickly." 



The negroes are also proud of their woolly hair, and some of 

 them go so far as to build an enormous structure on their heads. 

 Travelers say that the plaited headdress of the young women 

 at Jenna, in the valley of the Niger, looks like a dragon's crest. 

 The same custom prevails in Oceania among the Fijians, who 

 have woolly hair too, and wear coiffures measuring as much as 

 about five feet in circumference. 



Many peoples — Malays, Kirghis, Hottentots, Namaquas, Bush- 

 men, Brazilian Indians, and Society Islanders — are addicted to the 

 practice of flattening their noses, and sometimes, as in the case of 



