Beginning with Curr, it must be conceded that he is one of the leading authorities on Australia, the author of a four-volume treatise on that country and its natives.  Yet his testimony on the point in question happens to be as worthless as that of the most hasty globe-trotter, partly because he had evidently paid little attention to it, and partly also, I fancy, because of the fatal tendency of men of science to blunder as soon as they touch the domain of esthetics.  What he really wrote (II., 275) is that Chatfield had informed him that scars were made by the natives on the right thigh “for the purpose of denoting the particular class to which they belong.”  This Curr doubts, “without further evidence,” because it would conflict with the custom prevalent throughout the continent, “as far as known, which is to make these marks for ornament only.”  Now this is a pure assumption of Curr’s, based on a preconceived notion, and contradicted by the specific evidence of a number of explorers who, as even Grosse is obliged to admit (75), “unanimously account for a part at least of the scars as tribal marks."[100]

If so eminent an authority as Curr can err so grievously, it is obvious that the testimony of other writers and casual observers must be accepted with extreme caution.  Europeans and Americans are so accustomed to regard personal decorations as attempts to beautify the appearance that when they see them in savages there is a natural disposition to attribute them to the same motive.  They do not realize that they are dealing with a most subtle psychological question.  The chief source of confusion lies in their failure to distinguish between what is admired as a thing of beauty as such and what pleases them for other reasons.  As Professor Sully has pointed out in his Handbook of Psychology (337): 

“At the beginning of life there is no clear separation of what is beautiful from what is simply pleasing to the individual.  As in the history of the race, so in that of the individual, the sense of beauty slowly extricates itself from pleasurable consciousness in general, and differentiates itself from the sense of what is personally useful and agreeable.”

Bearing in mind this very important distinction between what is beautiful and what is merely pleasing because of its being useful and agreeable, we see at once that the words “decorative,” “ornamental,” “attractive,” “handsome,” etc., are constantly used by writers on this subject in a misleading and question-begging way.  We can hardly blame a man like Barrington for writing (11) that among the natives of Botany Bay “scars are, by both sexes, deemed highly ornamental”; but a scientific author who quotes such a sentence ought to be aware that the evidence did not justify Barrington in using any word but pleasing in place of “ornamental,” because the latter implies and takes for granted the esthetic sense, the existence of which is the very thing to be proved.  This remark applies generally to the evidence of this kind which Westermarck has so industriously collected, and which, on account of this undiscriminating, question-begging character, is entirely worthless.  In all these cases the fact is overlooked that the “decorations” of one sex may be agreeable to the other for reasons that have nothing to do with the sense of beauty.