pleasure we find in our infants years before they have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty; and this brings me to the pith of my argument.  Had the facts warranted it, I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration of personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage to marry a particular girl or man; for most of the “decorations” described in the preceding pages are not elements of personal beauty at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or mutilations of it.  I have shown by a superabundance of facts that these “decorations” do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous passion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-esthetically and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc.  I shall now proceed to show, much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve among the lower races as a stimulant of sexual passion.  This we should expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or figures.  Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows that nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even pretty faces; but these are not appreciated.  Galton told Darwin that he saw in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but they were not attractive to the natives.  Zoeller saw at least one beautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of the Brazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago (354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautiful figures when young—­every joint and limb well turned.  But as we shall see presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, as among savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty.  Ugliness, whether natural or inflicted by fashion, does not among these races act as a bar to marriage.  “Beauty is of no estimation in either sex,” we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272):  “It is strength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; and to be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman he may choose for a wife.”  Belden found that the squaws were valued “only for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is taken of their personal beauty,” etc., etc.  Nor can the fact that savages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regard for personal beauty.  Such children are put out of the way for the simple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or the tribe.