“DECORATION” FOR PROTECTION

Many of the alleged personal “decorations” of inferior races are merely measures to protect themselves against climate, insects, etc.  The Maoris of New Zealand besmear themselves with grease and red ochre as a defence against the sand-flies.[47] The Andaman islanders plaster themselves with a mixture of lard and colored earth to protect their skins from heat and mosquitoes.[48] Canadian Indians painted their faces in winter as a protection against frost-bite.  In Patagonia

“both sexes smear their faces, and occasionally their bodies with paint, the Indians alleging as the reasons for using this cosmetic that it is a protection against the effects of the wind; and I found from personal experience that it proved a complete preservative from excoriation or chapped skin."[49]

C. Bock notes that in Sumatra rice powder is lavishly employed by many of the women, but “not with the object of preserving the complexion or reducing the color, but to prevent perspiration by closing the pores of the skin."[50] Baumann says of the African Bakongo that many of their peculiar ways of arranging the hair “seem to be intended less as ornamental head-dresses than as a bolster for the burdens they carry on their heads;"[51] and Squier says that the reason given by the Nicaraguans for flattening the heads of their children is that they may be better fitted in adult life to bear burdens.[52]

WAR “DECORATIONS”

Equally remote as the foregoing from all ideas of personal beauty or of courtship and the desire to inspire sexual passion is the custom so widely prevalent of painting and otherwise “adorning” the body for war.  The Australians diversely made use of red and yellow ochre, or of white pigment for war paint.[53] Caesar relates that the ancient Britons stained themselves blue with woad to give themselves a more horrid aspect in war.  “Among ourselves,” as Tylor remarks, “the guise which was so terrific in the Red Indian warrior has comedown to make the circus clown a pattern of folly,"[54] Regarding Canadian Indians we read that

“some may be seen with blue noses, but with cheeks and eyebrows black; others mark forehead, nose, and cheeks with lines of various colors; one would think he beheld so many hobgoblins.  They believe that in colors of this description they are dreadful to their enemies, and that otherwise their own line of battle will be concealed as by a veil; finally, that it hardens the skin of the body, so that the cold of the winter is easily borne."[55]

The Sioux Indians blackened their faces when they went on the warpath.  They