the savage has “as much right to his taste,” as we have.  The more I think of it, the more I am amazed at this unjust and idiotic discrimination against the esthetic faculty—­a discrimination for which I can find no other explanation than the fact already referred to, that most men of science know so much less about matters of beauty than about everything else in the world.  They labor under the delusion that the sense of beauty is one of the earliest products of mental evolution, whereas their own attitude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest.  They will understand some day that a steatopygous “Hottentot Venus” is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot is beautiful because she pleases a drunken libertine.

What makes the traditional attitude of scientific men in this matter the less pardonable is that—­as we have seen—­there is always a simple, practical explanation for the predilections of these savages, so that there is no necessity whatever for assuming the existence of so paradoxical and impossible a thing as an esthetic admiration of these hideous deformities.  Thus, in regard to the nauseating lip “ornaments” of the Thlinkeets just referred to, the testimony collected by Bancroft indicates unmistakably that they are approved of, perpetuated, and aggravated for two reasons—­both non-esthetic—­namely, as indications of rank, and from the necessity of conforming to fashion.  Ladies of distinction, we read, increase the size of their lip plug.  Langsdorff even saw women “of very high rank” with this “ornament” full five inches long and three broad; Dixon says the mutilation is always in proportion to the person’s wealth; and Mayne relates, in his book on the British Columbia Indians, that “a woman’s rank among women is settled according to the size of her wooden lip.”

INDIFFERENCE TO DIRT

That savages can have no sense of personal beauty is further proved by their habitual indifference to personal cleanliness, the most elementary and imperative of esthetic requirements.  When we read in McLean (II., 153) that some Eskimo girls “might pass as pretty if divested of their filth;” or in Cranz (I., 134) that “it is almost sickening to view their hands and faces smeared with grease ... and their filthy clothes swarming with vermin;” and when we further read in Kotzebue (II., 56) regarding the Kalush that his “filthy countrywomen with their lip-trough ... often awaken in him the most vehement passion,” we realize vividly that that passion is a coarse appetite which exists quite apart from, and independently of, anything that might be considered beautiful or ugly.

The subject is not a pleasant one; but as it is one of my strongest arguments, I must be pardoned for giving some more unsavory details.  Among some of the British Columbia Indians “pretty women may be seen; nearly all have good eyes and hair, but the state of filth in which they live generally neutralizes any natural charms they may possess.”  (Mayne, 277.) Lewis and Clarke write (439) regarding the Chinook Indians: