340 FASHION IN DEFORMITY xx 



numerous facts, that the most constant and the most frequent 

 effects of this deformation, though only carried to a small 

 degree, are headaches, deafnesses, cerebral congestions, menin- 

 gitis, cerebritis, and epilepsy ; that idiocy or madness often 

 terminates this series of evils ; and that the asylums for 

 lunatics and imbeciles receive a large number of their inmates 

 from among these unhappy people." 1 For this reason the 

 French physicians have exerted all their influence, and with 

 great success, to introduce a more rational system in the 

 districts where the practice of compressing the heads of 

 infants prevailed." 2 



We may now pass from the head to the extremities, but 

 there will be little to say about the hands, for the artificial 

 deformities practised upon those members are confined to 

 chopping off one or more of the fingers, generally of the left 

 hand, and usually not so much in obedience merely to fashion, 

 as part of an initiatory ceremony, or an expiation or oblation 

 to some superior, or to some departed person. Such practices 

 are common among the American Indians, some tribes of 

 Africans, the Australians, and Polynesians, especially those 

 greatest of all slaves of ceremonial, the Fijians, where the 

 amputation of fingers is demanded to appease an angry 

 chieftain, or voluntarily performed as a token of affection on 

 the occasion of the death of a relative. 



But per contra, the feet have suffered more, and altogether 

 with more serious results to general health and comfort, from 

 simple conformity to pernicious customs, than any other part 

 of the body. And on this subject, instead of relating the 

 unaccountable caprices of the savage, we have to speak only 

 of people who have already advanced to a tolerably high 

 grade of civilisation, and to include all those who are at the 

 present time foremost in the ranks of intellectual culture. 



The most extreme instance of modification of the size and 



1 Gosse, " Essai sur les Deformations artificielles du Crane," Annalesd' Hygiene, 

 2 ser. torn. iv. p. 8. 



2 Ample references to the literature of artificially produced deformities of the 

 cranium are given by Prof. Rolleston, in Greenwell's British Barrows (1877), 

 p. 596. To these may be added, Lenhossek, Des Deformations artificielles du 

 Cranes, etc., Budapest, 1878, and Topinard, "Des Deformations ethniques du 

 Crane," in the Revue d' Anthropologie, July 1879, p. 496. 



