1880.] 



Fashion in Deformity. 



397 



tlio lobo of tlio car for the purpose of inserting some adventitious 

 object by way of adornment, or even for utility, as in the man of the 

 Island of Mangca, figured in Cook's Voyages, who carries a large 

 knife through a hole in the lobe of the right ear. Among ourselves, 

 the custom of wearing earrings still survives, even in the highest 

 grades of society, although it has been almost entirely abandoned 

 by one-half of the community, and in the other the perforation is 

 reduced to the smallest size compatible with the purpose of carrying 

 the ornament suspended from it. 



The teeth, although allowed by the greater part of the world to 

 retain their natural beauty and usefulness of form, still offer a field 

 for artificial alterations according to fashion, which has been made 

 use of principally in two distinct regions of the world and by two 

 distinct races. It is, of course, only the front teeth, and mainly the 

 upper incisors, that are available for this purpose. Among various 

 tribes of negroes of Equatorial Africa, different fashions of modifying 

 the natural form of these teeth prevail, specimens of which may be 

 found in any large collection of crania of these people. One of the 

 simplest consists of chipping and filing away a large triangular piece 

 from the lower and inner edge of each of the central incisors, so that 

 a gap is produced in the middle of the row in front (Fig. 5, 1). 

 Another fashion is to shape all the incisors into sharp points, by 

 chipping off the corners, giving a very formidable crocodilian 

 appearance to the jaws (2) ; and another is to file out either a single 

 or a double notch in the cutting edge of each tooth, producing a 

 serrated border to the whole series (3). 



Fig, 5. 



Upper front teeth altered according to fashion. 1, 2, 3, African ; 4, 5, 6, Malay. 



The Malays, however, excel the Africans, both in the universality 

 and in the fantastic variety of their supposed improvements upon 

 nature. While the natural whiteness of the surface of these organs 



