Max Buchner (352-4) gives a graphic description (1878) of the nude female surf swimmers in the Hawaiian Islands.  Nor is this indifference to nudity manifested only by these primitive races.  In Japan, to the present day, men and women bathe in the same room, separated merely by a partition, two or three feet high.[8] Zoeller relates of the Cholos of Ecuador (P. and A., 364) that “men and women bathe together in the rivers with a naivete surpassing that of the South Sea Islanders.”  A writer in the Ausland (1870, p. 294) reports that in Paraguay he saw the women washing their only dress, and while they waited for the sun to dry it, they stood by naked calmly smoking their cigars.

But natural indifference to nudity is the least of the curiosities of modesty.  Sometimes nakedness is actually prescribed by law or by strict etiquette.  In Rohl all women who are not Arabic are forbidden to wear clothing of any sort.  The King of Mandingo allowed no women, not even princesses, to approach him unless they were naked (Hellwald, 77-8).  Dubois (I., 265) says that in some of the southern provinces of India the women of certain castes must uncover their body from the head to the girdle when speaking to a man:  “It would be thought a want of politeness and good breeding to speak to men with that part of the body clothed.”

In his travels among the Cameroon negroes Zoeller (II., 185) came across a strange bit of religious etiquette in regard to nudity.  The women there wear nothing but a loin cloth, except in case of a death, when, like ourselves, they appear all in black—­with a startling difference, however.  One day, writes Zoeller,

“I was astounded to see a number of women and girls strolling about stark naked before the house of a man who had died of diphtheria.  This, I was told, was their mourning dress....  The same custom prevails in other parts of West Africa.”

Modesty is as fickle as fashion and assumes almost as many different forms as dress itself.  In most Australian tribes the women (as well as the men) go naked, yet in a few they not only wear clothes but go out of sight to bathe.  Stranger still, the Pele islanders were so innocent of all idea of clothing that when they first saw Europeans they believed that their clothes were their skins.  Nevertheless, the men and women bathed in different places.  Among South American Indians nudity is the rule, whereas some North American Indians used to place guards near the swimming-places of the women, to protect them from spying eyes.

According to Gill (230), the Papuans of Southwestern New Guinea “glory in their nudeness and consider clothing fit only for women.”  There are many places where the women alone were clothed, while in others the women alone were naked.  Mtesa, the King of Uganda, who died in 1884, inflicted the death penalty on any man who dared to approach him without having every inch of his legs carefully covered; but the women who acted as his servants were stark naked (Hellwald, 78).