316 FASHION IN DEFORMI7Y xx 



those affecting the dress only, which, even in Shakespeare's 

 time, changed so often that "the fashion wears out more 

 apparel than the man." Alterations once made in the form 

 of the body cannot be discarded or modified in the lifetime 

 of the individual, and therefore, as fashion is intrinsically 

 imitative, such alterations have the strongest possible tendency 

 to be reproduced generation after generation. 



The origins of these fashions are mostly lost in obscurity, 

 all attempts to solve them being little more than guesses. 

 Some of them have become associated with religious or super- 

 stitious observances, and so have been spread and perpetuated ; 

 some have been vaguely thought to be hygienic in motive ; 

 most have some relation to conventional standards of improved 

 personal appearance ; but whatever their origin, the desire to 

 conform to common usage, and not to appear singular, is the 

 prevailing motive which leads to their continuance. They 

 are perpetuated by imitation, which, as Herbert Spencer says, 

 may result from, two widely divergent motives. It may be 

 prompted by reverence for one imitated, or it may be 

 prompted by the desire to assert equality with him. 



Before treating of the subject in its application to the 

 human body, it will be well to glance, in passing, at the fact 

 that a precisely similar propensity has impelled man, at various 

 ages of the world's history, and under various conditions of 

 society, to interfere in the same manner with the natural 

 conformation of many of the animals which have come under 

 his influence through domestication. 



The Hottentots, objecting to symmetry of growth in the 

 horns of their cattle, twist them while young and pliant, so 

 that ultimately they are made to assume various fantastic and 

 unnatural directions. Sheep with multiple horns are pro- 

 duced in some parts of Africa, by splitting with a knife the 

 budding horn of the young animal. Hotspur's exclamation : 

 "What horse? a roan, a crop -ear, is it not ? " points to a 

 custom not yet extinct in England. Docking horses' tails 

 that is, cutting off about half the length, not of the hair only, 

 but of the actual flesh and bone, and nicking, or dividing the 

 tendons of the under side, so that the paralysed stump is 

 always carried in an unnatural or " cocked " position was 



