curled with hot irons, and instead of
wearing caps they bind their heads with fillets. A knight seldom
appears in public with his head uncovered, and properly shaved,
according to the apostolic precept (I Corinthians, Chapter XI,
verses 7 and 14)."

We have seen that there is good reason for assuming a certain fundamental
tendency whereby the most various peoples of the world, at all events in
the person of their most intelligent members, recognize and accept a
common ideal of feminine beauty, so that to a certain extent beauty may be
said to have an objectively aesthetic basis. We have further found that
this aesthetic human ideal is modified, and very variously modified in
different countries and even in the same country at different periods, by
a tendency, prompted by a sexual impulse which is not necessarily in
harmony with aesthetic cannons, to emphasize, or even to repress, one or
other of the prominent secondary sexual characters of the body. We now
come to another tendency which is apt to an even greater extent to limit
the cultivation of the purely aesthetic ideal of beauty: the influences of
national or racial type.

To the average man of every race the woman who most completely embodies
the type of his race is usually the most beautiful, and even mutilations
and deformities often have their origin, as Humboldt long since pointed
out, in the effort to accentuate the racial type.[152] Eastern women
possess by nature large and conspicuous eyes, and this characteristic
they seek still further to heighten by art. The Ainu are the hairiest of
races, and there is nothing which they consider so beautiful as hair. It
is difficult to be sexually attracted to persons who are fundamentally
unlike ourselves in racial constitution.[153]

It frequently happens that this admiration for racial characteristics
leads to the idealization of features which are far removed from aesthetic
beauty. The firm and rounded breast is certainly a feature of beauty, but
among many of the black peoples of Africa the breasts fall at a very early
period, and here we sometimes find that the hanging breast is admired as
beautiful.

The African Baganda, the Rev. J. Roscoe states (_Journal of the
Anthropological Institute_, January-June, 1902, p. 72), admire
hanging breasts to such an extent that their young women tie them
down in order to hasten the arrival of this condition.

"The most remarkable trait o