“distrusting their courage, strength, and arms, they think that paint of various colors, feathers, shouting, trumpets, and other instruments of terror will forward their success."[61]

Fancourt(314) says of the natives of Yucatan that “in their wars, and when they went to their sacrificial dances and festivals, they had their faces, arms, thighs, and legs painted and naked.”  In Fiji the men bore a hole through the nose and put in a couple of feathers, nine to twelve inches long, which spread out over each side of the face like immense mustaches.  They do this “to give themselves a fiercer appearance."[62] Waitz notes that in Tahiti mothers compressed the heads of their infant boys “to make their aspect more terrible and thus turn them into more formidable warriors.”  The Tahitians, as Ellis informs us, “went to battle in their best clothes, sometimes perfumed with fragrant oil, and adorned with flowers."[63] Of the wild tribes in Kondhistan, too, we read that “it is only, however, when they go out to battle ... that they adorn themselves with all their finery."[64]

AMULETS, CHARMS, MEDICINES.

The African tribes along the Congo wear on their bodies

“the horn, the hoof, the hair, the teeth, and the bones of all manner of quadrupeds; the feathers, beaks, claws, skulls, and bones of birds; the heads and skins of snakes; the shells and fins of fishes, pieces of old iron, copper, wood, seeds of plants, and sometimes a mixture of all, or most of them, strung together.”

Unsophisticated travellers speak of these things as “ornaments” indicating the strange “sense of beauty” of these natives.  In reality, they have nothing to do with the sense of beauty, but are merely a manifestation of savage superstition.  In Tuckey’s Zaire, from which the above citation is made (375), they are properly classed as fetiches, and the information is added that in the choice of them the natives consult the fetich men.  A picture is given in the book of one appendage to the dress “which the weaver considered an infallible charm against poison.”  Others are “considered as protection against the effects of thunder and lightning, against the attacks of the alligator, the hippopotamus, snakes, lions, tigers,” etc., etc.  Winstanley relates (II., 68) that in Abyssinia

“the Mateb, or baptismal cord, is de rigueur, and worn when nothing else is.  It formed the only clothing of the young at Seramba, but was frequently added to with amulets, sure safeguards against sorcery.”

Concerning the Bushmen, Mackenzie says: