had they possessed a sense of humor to
counterbalance and control their erudition. The violent opposition of
Madagascar women to King Radama's order that the men should have their
hair cut, to which Westermarck refers (174-75), surely finds in the
proverbial stupid conservatism of barbarous customs a simpler and more
rational explanation than in his assumption that this riot illustrated
"the important part played by the hair of the head as a stimulant of
sexual passion" (to these coarse, masculine women, who had to be
speared before they could be quieted). An argument which attributes to
unwashed, vermin-covered savages a fanatic zeal for what they consider
as beautiful, such as no civilized devotee of beauty would ever dream
of, involves its own _reductio ad absurdum_ by proving too much.
Westermarck also cites (177) from a book on Brazil the story that if a
young maiden of the Tapoyers "be marriageable, and yet not courted by
any, the mother paints her with some red color about the eyes," and in
accordance with his theory we are soberly expected to accept this red
paint about the eyes as an effective "stimulant of sexual passion," in
case of a girl whose appearance otherwise did not tempt men to court
her! The obvious object of the paint was to indicate that the girl was
in the market. In other words, it was part of that language of signs
which had such a remarkable development among some of the uncivilized
races (see Mallery's admirable treatises on Indian Pictographs, taking
up hundreds of pages in two volumes of the Bureau of Ethnology at
Washington). Belden relates (145) of the Plains Indians that a warrior
who is courting a squaw usually paints his eyes yellow or blue, and
the squaw paints hers red. He even knew squaws, go through the painful
operation of reddening the eyeballs, which he interprets as resulting
from a desire to fascinate the men; but it is much more likely that it
had some special significance in the language of courtship, probably
as a mark of courage in enduring pain, than that the inflamed eye
itself was considered beautiful. Belden himself further points out
that "a red stripe drawn horizontally from one eye to the other, means
that the young warrior has seen a squaw he could love if she would
reciprocate his attachment," and on p. 144 he explains that "when a
warrior smears his face with lampblack and then draws zigzags with his
nails, it is a sign that he desires to be left alone, or is trapp