Thus we see that what keeps up this hideous custom is not the women’s desire to arouse the esthetic admiration and amorous passion of the men by a hoof of beauty, but the fear of ridicule and persecution by the other women, slaves of fashion all.  These same motives are the source of most of the ugly fashions prevalent even in civilized Europe and America.  Theophile Gautier believed that most women had no sense of beauty, but only a sense of fashion; and if explorers and missionaries had borne in mind the fundamental difference between fashion and esthetics, anthropological literature would be the poorer by hundreds of “false facts” and ludicrous inferences.[113]

The ravages of fashion are aggravated by emulation, which has its sources in vanity and envy.  This accounts for the extremes to which mutilations and fashions often go among both, civilized and uncivilized races, and of which a startling instance will be described in detail in the next paragraph.  Few of our rich women wear their jewels because of their intrinsic beauty.  They wear them for the same reason that Polynesian or African belles wear all the beads they can get.  In Mariner’s book on the Tongans (Chap.  XV.) there is an amusing story of a chiefs daughter who was very anxious to go to Europe.  Being asked why, she replied that her great desire was to amass a large quantity of beads and then return to Tonga, “because in England beads are so common that no one would admire me for wearing them, and I should not have the pleasure of being envied." Bancroft (I., 128) says of the Kutchin Indians:  “Beads are their wealth, used in the place of money, and the rich among them literally load themselves with necklaces and strings of various patterns.”  Referring to the tin ornaments worn by Dyaks, Carl Bock says he has “counted as many as sixteen rings in a single ear, each of them the size of a dollar”; while of the Ghonds Forsyth tells us (148) that they “deck themselves with an inordinate amount of what they consider ornaments. Quantity rather than quality is aimed at."

PERSONAL BEAUTY VERSUS PERSONAL DECORATION

Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so far in this long chapter, assume that savages and barbarians have no esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it?  Not necessarily.  I believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty may exist even among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is little more than a childish pleasure in bright and lustrous shells and other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility (language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to esthetics—­that is, the love of beauty for its own sake. Such a germ of esthetic