208 CEREMONIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



that corpulence is a mark of distinction among Tahitian 

 females. Throughout Africa there prevails an admiration 

 for corpulence in women, which, in some places, rises to a 

 great pitch; as in Karague where the king has &quot; very fat 

 wives &quot; where, according to Spoke, the king s sister-in-law 

 &quot; was another of those wonders of obesity, unable to stand 

 excepting on all fours,&quot; and where, &quot; as fattening is the 

 first duty of fashionable female life, it must be duly en 

 forced by the rod if necessary.&quot; Still stranger 

 are the marks of dignity constituted by diseases resulting 

 from those excessive gratifications of appetite which wealth 

 makes possible. Even among ourselves may be traced an 

 association of ideas which thus originates. The story about 

 a gentleman of the old school, who, hearing that some man 

 of inferior extraction was suffering from gout, exclaimed 

 &quot;Damn the fellow; wasn t rheumatism good enough for 

 him,&quot; illustrates the still-current idea that gout is a gentle 

 manly disease, because it results from that high living which 

 presupposes the abundant means usually associated with su 

 perior position. Introduced by this instance, the instance 

 which comes to us from Polynesia will seem not unnatural. 

 &quot; The habitual use of ava causes a whitish scurf on the skin, 

 which among the heathen Tahitians was reckoned a badge 

 of nobility; the common people not having the means of 

 indulgence requisite to produce it.&quot; But of all marks of 

 dignity arising in this way, or indeed in any way, the 

 strangest is one which Ximenez tells us of as existing 

 among the people of ancient Guatemala. The sign of a 

 disorder, here best left unspecified, which the nobles were 

 liable to, because of habits which wealth made possible, 

 had become among the Guatemalans a sign &quot; of great 

 ness and majesty; &quot; and its name was applied even to the 

 deity ! 



422. How these further class-distinctions, though not, 

 like preceding ones, directly traceable to militancy, are in- 



