TATTOOING PROCESS. 411 



they were folded, and one being- selected, Eichess 

 commenced with it a dotting kind of puncturing 

 in the skin, along a semicircular line, previously 

 marked with a piece of charcoal around the frontal 

 edge of the orbit, and which, besides including the 

 bald part of the original eyebrow, was prolonged con- 

 siderably towards the lower part of the temple, and 

 also extended to the middle of the space between 

 the eyes, where it met the similar delineation coming 

 from the other side. Blood soon flowed freely, and 

 I could scarcely have imagined it possible that such 

 a punishment could be sustained for the attainment 

 of so unnatural an ornament. Custom must con- 

 stitute the principal part of original sin, or such 

 barbarous attempts as these to improve upon 

 nature would not be persisted in from one genera- 

 tion to another. The ladies of antiquity, I recollect 

 learning when I was a student, employed a black 

 mineral, stibium, supposed to be plumbago, or black 

 lead ; for the purpose, says Celsus, of making them 

 black browed, and this fashion, with many others, 

 appears to have been early introduced into Abyssinia, 

 either by the Greeks or Romans, and has been 

 continued in that country to the present day. The 

 manner in which a lady of fashion dresses her hair 

 in Shoa, in a series of close pipe-like curls, is 

 identically the same with the head-dress repre- 

 sented in the bust of Octavia, the niece of Augustus, 

 in the British Museum, (Chamber vi. No. 65,) and 

 I should require no other woodcut to illustrate 



