442 
Annual Report of the 
strous, and can, no more than deformity or misshapen growth in 
the animal kingdom, commend itself to taste. The works of art 
and the products of nature, all recognize this dependence. The 
beauty of the plant and the animal, come in connection with the 
highest fulfillment of their own economy and functions. The ca¬ 
thedral and the palace owe their grandeur to their enlarged and pow¬ 
erful ministrations to certain wants of body and mind. Every¬ 
where it is the useful that gives direction and restraint to art, and 
•v that utility, no matter how high or how low it is, which calls forth 
a production, must define its form, aptness, felicity of execution. 
Beauty lingers over, elaborates and brings to a delicate finish, that 
which utility merely would have more hastily accepted as sufficient 
to its purpose. Dress, then, in habitually setting aside the obvious 
utilities it should pursue, is as lawless under art, as untrue to the 
ends of beauty, as it is unfaithful to the first simple interests we 
commit to it. Some articles of ornament are in entire neglect of 
use, others are directly at war with it. Of the first class are rings, 
bracelets, ear-rings. These are evidently barbarous in their deriv¬ 
ations, a remnant of that early, rude period in which no suffering 
was spared, nor any annoyance rejected, that lay in the line of some 
startling, savage effect. In the absence of garments, figures and 
colors were tattooed into the skin, and long welts raised upon it; 
the lip was distended with a ring, and ornaments hung about the 
person as they could find points of attachment; wristlets and an¬ 
klets, ear-rings and nose-rings, alike subserved one purpose, and 
had one justification. The ears still furnish too facile a point of 
suspension to be over-looked, though the nose has lost its preroga¬ 
tive, and been compelled to fall back on purely physical function. The 
twirling of the moustache, with inward or outward, upward or 
downward, bend, affords however, a feeble substitute to a portion of 
the race. 
The second class, or garments at war with all uses, we have seen 
to include the larger share of the female wardrobe. 
Another obvious principle would seem to be that garments fulfill¬ 
ing a wholly secondary function, ought to be secondary in the 
pression they are intended to produce. Clothes, as in union with 
the most perfect physical form, should submit to and indicate that 
form. Artists have, in painting especially, met with a serious dif¬ 
ficulty in the garments of their figures. If the fashions of the 
