“The motives are various; the men paint their bodies to make themselves appear terrible in battle; certain mutilations are connected with religious rites, or they mark the age of puberty, or the rank of the man, or they serve to distinguish the tribes.  Among savages the same fashions prevail for long periods, and thus mutilations, from whatever cause first made, soon come to be valued as distinctive marks. But self-adornment, vanity, and the admiration of others seem to be the commonest motives.”

Among those who were led astray by these views of Darwin is Westermarck, who declares (257, 172) that “in every country, in every race, beauty stimulates passion,” and that

“it seems to be beyond doubt that men and women began to ornament, mutilate, paint, and tattoo themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex—­that they might court successfully, or be courted”

—­an opinion in which Grosse follows him, in his interesting treatise on the Beginnings of Art (111, etc.), thereby marring his chapter on “Personal Decoration.”  In the following pages I shall show, on the contrary, that when we subject these primitive customs of “ornamentation” and mutilation to a critical examination we find in nearly every case that they are either not at all or only indirectly (not esthetically), connected with the relations of the sexes; and that neither does personal beauty exist as a rule among savages, nor have they the esthetic sense to appreciate its exceptional occurrence.  They nearly always paint, tattoo, decorate, or mutilate themselves without the least reference to courtship or the desire to please the other sex.  It is the easiest thing in the world to fill page after page—­as Darwin, Westermarck, Grosse, and others have done—­with the remarks of travellers regarding the addiction of savages to personal “ornamentation”; but this testimony rests, as we shall see, on the unwarranted assumptions of superficial observers, who, ignorant of the real reasons why the lower races paint, tattoo, and otherwise “adorn” themselves, recklessly inferred that they did it to “make themselves beautiful.”  The more carefully the customs and traditions of these races are studied, the more obvious becomes the non-esthetic and non-erotic origin of their personal “decorations.”  In my extensive researches, for every single fact that seemed to favor the sexual selection theory I have found a hundred against it; and I have become more and more amazed at the extraordinary sang froid with which its advocates have ignored the countless facts that speak against it while boosting into prominence the very few that at first sight appear to support it.  In the following pages I shall attempt to demolish the theory of sexual selection in reference to the lower races of man as Wallace demolished it in reference to animals; premising that the mass of cumulative evidence here presented is only a very small part of what might be adduced on my side.  Let us consider the different motives for personal “decoration” in succession.