of the sacrum, the yellow race next, while the black race has the flattest sacrum.[140] The black race thus possesses the least developed pelvis, the narrowest, and the flattest.  It is certainly not an accidental coincidence that it is precisely among people of black race that we find a simulation of the large pelvis of the higher races admired and cultivated in the form of steatopygia.  This is an enormously exaggerated development of the subcutaneous layer of fat which normally covers the buttocks and upper parts of the thighs in woman, and in this extreme form constitutes a kind of natural fatty tumor.  Steatopygia cannot be said to exist, according to Deniker, unless the projection of the buttocks exceeds 4 per cent of the individual’s height; it frequently equals 10 per cent.  True steatopygia only exists among Bushman and Hottentot women, and among the peoples who are by blood connected with them.  An unusual development of the buttocks is, however, found among the Woloffs and many other African peoples.[141] There can be no doubt that among the black peoples of Africa generally, whether true steatopygia exists among them or not, extreme gluteal development is regarded as a very important, if not the most important, mark of beauty, and Burton stated that a Somali man was supposed to choose his wife by ranging women in a row and selecting her who projected farthest a tergo.[142] In Europe, it must be added, clothing enables this feature of beauty to be simulated.  Even by some African peoples the posterior development has been made to appear still larger by the use of cushions, and in England in the sixteenth century we find the same practice well recognized, and the Elizabethan dramatists refer to the “bum-roll,” which in more recent times has become the bustle, devices which bear witness to what Watts, the painter, called “the persistent tendency to suggest that the most beautiful half of humanity is furnished with tails."[143] In reality, as we see, it is simply a tendency, not to simulate an animal character, but to emphasize the most human and the most feminine of the secondary sexual characters, and therefore, from the sexual point of view, a beautiful feature.[144]

Sometimes admiration for this characteristic is associated with admiration for marked obesity generally, and it may be noted that a somewhat greater degree of fatness may also be regarded as a feminine secondary sexual character.  This admiration is specially marked among several of the black peoples of Africa, and here to become a beauty a woman must, by drinking enormous quantities of milk, seek to become very fat.  Sonnini noted that to some extent the same thing might be found among the Mohammedan women of Egypt.  After bright eyes and a soft, polished, hairless skin, an Egyptian woman, he stated, most desired to obtain embonpoint; men admired fat women and women sought to become fat.  “The idea of a very fat woman,” Sonnini adds, “is nearly always