398 Professor Flower [May 7, 



is always admired by us, and by most people, the Malays take the 

 greatest pains to stain their teeth black, which they consider greatly 

 adds to their beauty. White teeth are looked upon with perfect 

 disgust by the Dayaks of the neighbourhood of Sarawak. In addi- 

 tion to staining the teeth, filing the surface in some way or other is 

 almost always resorted to. The nearly universal custom in Java is 

 to remove the enamel from the front surface of the incisors, and often 

 the canine teeth, hollowing out the surface, sometimes, but not often, 

 so deeply as to penetrate the pulp cavity (4). The cutting edges are 

 also worn down to a level line with pumice-stone. Another, and less 

 common, though more elaborate fashion, is to point the teeth, and 

 file out notches from the anterior surface of each side of the upper 

 part of the crown, so as to leave a lozenge- shaped piece of enamel 

 untouched; as this receives the black stain less strongly than the 

 parts from which the surface is removed, an ornamental pattern is 

 produced (5). In Borneo a still more elaborate process is adopted, the 

 front surface of each of the teeth is drilled near its centre with a 

 small round hole, and into this a plug of brass with a round or star- 

 shaped knob is fixed (6). This is always kept bright and polished 

 by the action of the lip over it, and is supposed to give a highly 

 attractive appearance when the teeth are displayed. 



Perhaps the strange custom, so frequently adopted by the natives of 

 Australia, and of many islands of the Pacific, of knocking out one or 

 more of the front teeth, might be mentioned here, but it is usually 

 associated with some other idea than ornament or even mere fashion. 

 In the former case it constitutes part of the rites by which the youth 

 are initiated into manhood, and in the Sandwich Islands it is performed 

 as a propitiatory sacrifice to the spirits of the dead. 



The projection forwards of the front upper teeth, w^hich we think 

 unbecoming, is admired by some races, and among the negro women 

 of Senegal it is increased by artificial means employed in childhood.* 



All these modifications of form of comj^aratively external and 

 flexible parts are, however, trivial in their effects upon the body to 

 those which I shall speak of next, which induce permanent structural 

 alterations both upon the bony framework and upon the important 

 organs within. 



Whatever might be the case with regard to the hair, the ears, the 

 nose, and lips, or even the teeth, it might have been thought that the 

 actual shape of the head, as determined by the solid skull, would not 

 have been considered a subject to be modified according to the fashion 

 of the time and place. Such, however, is far from being the case. The 

 custom of artificially changing the form of the head is one of the 

 most ancient and wide-spread with which we are acquainted. It is 

 far from being confined, as many suppose, to an obscure tribe of 

 Indians on the north-west coast of America, but is found, under various 

 modifications, at widely different parts of the earth's surface, and 



* Hamy, ' Revue d'Anthropologie,' Jan. 1879, p. 22. 



