ure alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, has
escaped the uglifying process. "Nothing is too absurd or hideous to
please them," writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a striking
illustration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation in
general is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than the
appreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerable
skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and
weapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them to
be foul and malodorous with the filth of years. One of the most
disgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians of
British Columbia, who insert a piece of bone in the lower lip, which,
gradually enlarged, makes it at last project three inches. Bancroft
(I., 98) devotes three pages to the lip mutilation indulged in by the
Thlinkeet females. When the operation is completed and the block is
withdrawn "the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather,
displaying the teeth, and presenting altogether a ghastly spectacle."
The lower teeth and gum, says one witness, are left quite naked;
another says that the plug "distorts every feature in the lower part
of the face"; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had a
lip "ornament" so large "that by a peculiar motion of her under-lip
she could almost conceal her whole face with it"; and a fourth gives a
description of this "abominably revolting spectacle," which is too
nauseating to quote.

DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM (?)

"Abominably revolting," "hideous," "filthy," "disgusting,"
"atrocious"--such are usually the words of observers in describing
these shocking mutilations. Nevertheless they always apply the word
"ornamentation" to them, with the implication that the savages look
upon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right to
say was that they pleased the savages and were approved by fashion.
What is worse, the philosophers fell into the pitfall thus dug for
them. Darwin thinks that the mutilations indulged in by savages show
"how different is the standard of _taste_"; Humboldt (III., 236)
reflects on the strange fact that nations "attach the idea of beauty"
to whatever configuration nature has given them; and Ploss (I., 48)
declares bluntly that there is no such thing as an absolute standard
of beauty and that savages have "just as much right" to their ideas on
the subject as we have to