By way of illustrating his maxim that “in every country, in every race, beauty stimulates passion,” Westermarck cites (257) part of a sentence by Lumholtz (213) to the effect that Australian women take much notice of a man’s face, particularly of the part about the eyes.  He does not cite the rest of the sentence—­“and they like to see a frank and open, or perhaps, more correctly, a wild expression of countenance,” which makes it clear to the reader that what stimulates the passion of these women is not the lines of beauty in the [never-washed] faces of these men, but the unbeautiful aspect peculiar to a wild hunter, ferocious warrior, and intrepid defender of his home.  Their admiration, in other words, is not esthetic, but instinctively utilitarian.

“DECORATION” AT THE AGE OF PUBERTY

We come now to the principal argument of Westermarck—­the alleged fact that in all parts of the world the desire for self-decoration is strongest at the beginning of the age of puberty, the customs of ornamenting, painting, mutilating, and tattooing the person being practised most zealously at that period.  This argument is as futile as the others, for several reasons.  In the first place, it is not true that in all parts of the world self-decoration is practised most zealously at that period.  More frequently, perhaps, it is begun some years earlier, before any idea of courtship can have entered the heads of these children.  The Congo cannibals begin the process of scarring the face at the age of four.[101] Dyak girls are tattooed at five.[102] The Botocudos begin the mutilating of children’s lips at the age of seven.[103] Eskimo girls are tattooed in their eighth year,[104] and on the Andaman Islands few children are allowed to pass their eighth year without scarification.[105] The Damaras chip the teeth with a flint “when the children are young."[106] The female Oraons are “all tattooed in childhood."[107] The Tahitians began tattooing at eight.[108] The Chukchis of Siberia tattoo girls at nine;[109] and so on in various parts of the world.  In the second place, of the divers personal “decorations” indulged in by the lower races it is only those that are intended to be of a permanent character (tattooing, scarring, mutilating) that are made chiefly, though by no means exclusively[110] about or before the age of puberty.

All the other methods of “decorating” described in the preceding pages as being connected with the rites of war, superstition, mourning, etc., are practised throughout life; and that they constitute by far the greater proportion of “ornamentations” is evidenced by the citation I have already made, from Brough Smyth, that the ornamentation of their persons was considered important by Australians only in connection with such ceremonies, and that “in ordinary life little attention was given to the ornamenting of the person”; to which much similar testimony