strings of various patterns." Referring to the tin
ornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has "counted as many as
sixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar";
while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they "deck themselves
with an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. _Quantity
rather than quality is aimed at."_

PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION

Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so
far in this long chapter, assume that savages and barbarians have no
esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. I
believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty _may_ exist even
among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is
little more than a childish pleasure in bright and lustrous shells and
other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything
beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility
(language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to
_esthetics_--that is, _the love of beauty for its own sake._ Such a
germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants _years before they
have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty;_ and
this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it,
I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the
sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least
yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration
of personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage to
marry a particular girl or man; for most of the "decorations"
described in the preceding pages are not elements of _personal_ beauty
at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or
mutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts that
these "decorations" do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous
passion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-esthetically
and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of
rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show,
much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve
among the lower races as a stimulant of sexual passion. This we should
expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in
bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or
figures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows