FINGER-NAILS
Our nails are modified claws—modified to their advantage.[advantage.] When properly cared for, they are one of the greatest personal ornaments—beginning and ending as they do with a delicate curve, rounded on the surface, suffused with a gentle blush, and smooth as ivory. They may also serve as a mode of expression and index of nationality, as seen in these remarks by Mr. E. B. Tylor: “In the Southern United States, till slavery was done away a few years ago, the traces of Negro descent were noted with the utmost nicety. Not only were the mixed breeds regularly classed as mulattos, quadroons, and down to octoroons, but even where the mixture was so slight that the untrained eye noticed nothing beyond a brunette complexion, the intruder, who had ventured to sit down at a public dinner-table, was called upon to show his hands, and the African taint detected by the dark tinge at the root of the finger-nails.”
Becker remarks that among the ancient Greeks “it was considered very unseemly to appear with nails unpared”; nor did the Greeks consider it beneath their dignity, like the Romans, to pare their own nails.
The Greeks, being an æsthetic nation, were guided in the treatment of their nails by the sense of beauty. Elsewhere, however, the idiotic notion that laziness is aristocratic led to a different treatment of the nails. Mr. Tylor, in his Anthropology, gives an illustration of the hand of a Chinese ascetic whose finger-nails are five or six times as long as his fingers. “Long finger-nails,” he remarks, “are noticed even among ourselves as showing that the owner does no manual labour, and in China and neighbouring countries they are allowed to grow to a monstrous length as a symbol of nobility, ladies wearing silver cases to protect them, or at least as a pretence that they are there.”
Useless hands, with elongated nails, reverting to a clawlike character, as “symbols of nobility!” The study of evolution throws much sarcastic light on the fashionable follies of mankind.