“always denote a certain order of rank, and here it depends upon age.  Boys under a certain age are not decorated; but in time they receive a few cross-stripes upon their chests and stomachs.  The number of stripes is gradually increased, and when the subjects have grown up, a half-moon-shaped line is cut around each nipple.”

The necessity for such distinctive marks on the body is particularly great among the Australians, because they are subdivided in the most complicated ways and have an elaborate code of sexual permissions and prohibitions.  Therefore, as Frazer suggests (38),

“a chief object of these initiation ceremonies was to teach the youths with whom they might or might not have connection, and to put them in possession of a visible language, ... by means of which they might be able to communicate their totems to, and to ascertain the totems of, strangers whose language they did not understand.”

In Africa, too, as we have seen, the scars are used as tribal names, and for other practical purposes.  Holub (7) found that the Koranna of Central South Africa has three cuts on the chest.  They confessed to him that they indicated a kind of free-masonry, insuring their being well received by Koranna everywhere.  On the Congo, scarifications are made on the back for therapeutic reasons, and on the face as tribal marks. (Mallery, 417; H. Ward, 136.) Bechuana priests make long scars on a warrior’s thigh to indicate that he has slain an enemy in battle.  (Lichtenstein, II., 331.) According to d’Albertis the people of New Guinea use some scars as a sign that they have travelled (I., 213).  And so on, ad infinitum.

ALLEGED TESTIMONY OF NATIVES

In face of this imposing array of facts revealing the non-esthetic character of primitive personal “decorations,” what have the advocates of the sexual selection theory to say?  Taking Westermarck as their most erudite and persuasive spokesman, we find him placing his reliance on four things:  (1) the practical ignoring of the vast multitude of facts contradicting his theory; (2) the alleged testimony of a few savages; (3) the testimony of some of their visitors; (4) the alleged fact that “the desire for self-decoration is strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty,” the customs of ornamenting, mutilating, painting, and tattooing being “practised most zealously at that period of life.”  Concerning (1) nothing more need be said, as the large number of decisive facts I have collected exposes and neutralizes that stratagem.  The other three arguments must be briefly considered.