who had killed someone, boastfully wore an ostrich feather on his head to call attention to his deed.  The Danakil wore these feathers for the same purpose, adding ivory rods in their ear-lobes and fastening a bunch of white horsehair to their shield.  A strip of red silk round the forehead served the same purpose.  Lumholtz, describing a festival dance in Australia (237), says that some of the men hold in their mouths tufts of talegalla feathers “for the purpose of giving themselves a savage look.”  By some Australians bunches of hawk’s or eagle’s feathers are worn “either when fighting or dancing, and also used as a fan” (Brough Smyth, I., 281-282), which suggests the thought that the fantastic head-dresses of feathers, etc., often seen in warm countries, may be worn as protection against the sun[96].

I doubt, too, whether the lower races are able to appreciate flowers esthetically as we do, apart from their fragrance, which endears them to some barbarians of the higher grades.  Concerning Australian women we find it recorded by Brough Smyth (I., 270) that they seem to have no love of flowers, and do not use them to adorn their persons.  A New Zealander explained his indifference to flowers by declaring that they were “not good to eat."[97] Other Polynesians were much given to wearing flowers on the head and body; but whether this was for esthetic reasons seems to me doubtful on account of the revelations made by various missionaries and others.  In Ellis, e.g. (P.R., I., 114), we read that in Tahiti the use of flowers in the hair, and fragrant oil, has been in a great degree discontinued, “partly from the connection of these ornaments with the evil practices to which they were formerly addicted.”

OBJECTS OF TATTOOING

So far tattooing has been mentioned only incidentally; but as it is one of the most widely prevalent methods of primitive personal “decoration” a few pages must be devoted to it in order to ascertain whether it is true that it is one of those ornamentations which, as Darwin would have us believe, help to determine the marriages of mankind, or, as Westermarck puts it, “men and women began to... tattoo themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex—­that they might court successfully, or be courted.”  We shall find that, on the contrary, tattooing has had from the earliest recorded times more than a dozen practical purposes, and that its use as a stimulant of the passion of the opposite sex probably never occurred to a savage until it was suggested to him by a philosophizing visitor.

Twenty-four centuries ago Herodotus not only noted that the Thracians had punctures on their skins, but indicated the reason for them:  they are, he said, “a mark of nobility:  to be without them is a testimony of mean descent."[98] This use of skin disfigurements prevails among the lower races to the present day, and it is only one of many utilitarian and non-esthetic functions subserved by them.  In his beautifully illustrated volume on Maori tattooing, Major-General Robley writes: