Advocates of the sexual selection theory make much ado over the fact that in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color and features—­black, red, or yellow, flat noses, high cheek bones, thick lips, etc.—­and dislike what we consider beautiful.  But the likes of these races regarding personal appearance have no more to do with a sense of beauty than their dislikes.  It is merely a question of habit.  They like their own faces because they are used to them, and dislike ours because they are strange.  In their aversion to our faces they are actuated by the same motive that makes a European child cry out and run away in terror at sight of a negro—­not because he is ugly, for he may be good-looking, but because he is strange.

Far from admiring such beauty as nature may have given them, the lower races exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating or mutilating it.  Hundreds of their visitors have written of certain tribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leave nature alone.  Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, has escaped the uglifying process.  “Nothing is too absurd or hideous to please them,” writes Cameron.  The Eskimos afford a striking illustration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation in general is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than the appreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerable skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and weapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them to be foul and malodorous with the filth of years.  One of the most disgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians of British Columbia, who insert a piece of bone in the lower lip, which, gradually enlarged, makes it at last project three inches.  Bancroft (I., 98) devotes three pages to the lip mutilation indulged in by the Thlinkeet females.  When the operation is completed and the block is withdrawn “the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather, displaying the teeth, and presenting altogether a ghastly spectacle.”  The lower teeth and gum, says one witness, are left quite naked; another says that the plug “distorts every feature in the lower part of the face”; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had a lip “ornament” so large “that by a peculiar motion of her under-lip she could almost conceal her whole face with it”; and a fourth gives a description of this “abominably revolting spectacle,” which is too nauseating to quote.

DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM (?)

“Abominably revolting,” “hideous,” “filthy,” “disgusting,” “atrocious”—­such are usually the words of observers in describing these shocking mutilations.  Nevertheless they always apply the word “ornamentation” to them, with the implication that the savages look upon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right to say was that they pleased the savages and