Fig. 67.—Hand of Chinese ascetic.
Fig. 68.—Botocudo woman with lip- and ear-ornaments.
The propensity to beautify the body with ornaments belongs to human nature as low down as we can follow it. In South America the naked people were adorned with rings on legs and arms, and one tribe had as their only apparel a macaw’s feather stuck in a hole at each corner of their mouths, and strings of shells hanging from their noses, ears, and under-lips. This latter case is a good example of the ornaments being fastened into the body, which is pierced or cut to receive them. Various tribes wear labrets or lip-ornaments, some gradually enlarging the hole through the under-lip till it will take a wooden plug two or three inches across, as in the portrait ([Fig. 68]) of a woman of the Botocudos, a Brazilian tribe who owe their name to this labret, which the Portuguese compared to a botoque or bung. Ear-ornaments, as the figure shows, are put in the same way in the lobe of the ear, which they stretch so that when the disc of wood is taken out it falls in a loop and even reaches the shoulder. Thus it is possible that there may be some truth in the favourite wonder-tale of the old geographers, about the tribes whose great ears reached down to their shoulders, though the story had to be stretched a good deal farther when it was declared that they lay down on one ear and covered themselves with the other for a blanket. The great interest to us in these savage ornaments is in the tendency of higher civilization to give them up. In Persia one still finds the nose-ring through one side of a woman’s nostril, but European taste would be shocked by this, though it allows the ear to be pierced to carry an ear-ring. As to ornaments which are merely put on, they are mostly feathers, flowers, or trinkets worn in the hair, or strung-ornaments or rings on the neck, arms, and legs. In what remote times man had begun to take pleasure in such decorations may be seen by the periwinkle-shells bored for stringing found in the cave of Cro-Magnon, which no doubt made necklaces and bracelets for the girls of the mammoth-period. In the modern world necklaces and bracelets remain in unchanged use, though anklets, such as the bangles of the Hindu dancing-girl, have of course disappeared from the costume of civilized wearers of shoes and stockings. It would not suit our customs to keep an affectionate memory of dead relatives by wearing their finger and toe bones strung as beads, as the Andaman women do, but our ladies keep in fashion barbaric necklaces of such things as shells, seeds, tigers’ claws, and especially polished stones. The wearing of shining stones as ornaments lasts on, whether they have come to be precious pearls or rubies, or glass beads which are imitation stones. Where metal becomes known it at once comes into use for ornament, and this reaches its height where amused travellers describe some Dayak girl with her arms sheathed in a coil of stout brass wire, or some African belle whose great copper rings on her limbs get so hot in the sun that an attendant carries a water-pot to sluice them down now and then. To see gold jewelry of the highest order, the student should examine that of the ancients, such as the Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan in the British Museum, and that of mediæval Europe. The art seems now to have passed its prime, and become a manufacture, of which the best products are imitations from the antique. The cutting of precious stones such as diamonds into facets is, however, a modern art. As to finger-rings, if their use arose out of the signet-rings of Egypt and Babylon, then the few which are still engraved as seals keep up the original idea, while those which only carry pearls or diamonds have turned into mere ornaments.
To come now to clothing proper. The man who wants a garment gets it in the simplest way when he takes the covering off a tree or a beast, and puts it on himself. The bark of trees provides clothes for rude races in many districts, as for instance in the curious use which natives of the Brazilian forests have long made of the so-called “shirt-tree” (lecythis). A man cuts a four or five feet length of the trunk, or a large branch, and gets the bark off in an entire tube, which he has then only to soak and beat soft and to cut slits for armholes, to be able to slip it on as a ready-made shirt; or a short length will make a woman’s skirt. The wearing of bark has sometimes been kept up as a sign of primitive simplicity. Thus in India it is written in the laws of Manu that when the grey-haired Brahman retires into the forest to end his days in religious meditation, he shall wear a skin or a garment of bark. A ruder people, the Kayans of Borneo, while in common life they like the smart foreign stuffs of the trader, when they go into mourning throw them off and return to the rude native garment of bark-cloth. In Polynesia the manufacture of tapa from the bark of the paper-mulberry was carried to great perfection, the women beating it out with grooved clubs into a sort of vegetable felt, and ornamenting it with coloured patterns stamped on. The people were delighted with the white paper of the Europeans, and dressed themselves in it as a fine variety of tapa, till they found that the first shower of rain spoilt it. Leaves, also, are made into aprons or skirts which clothe various rude tribes. Not only are there “leaf-wearers” in India, but at a yearly festival in Madras the whole low-caste population cast off their ordinary clothing, and put on aprons of leafy twigs.
The skin garments worn by the savages of the ancient world have rotted away these many thousand years, but we may see how generally they used to be worn, by the vast numbers of skin-dressing implements of sharp stone (see [Fig. 54], c), found in the ground. Till lately the Patagonians, when they came on their journeys to a place where suitable flint or obsidian was to be found, would load themselves with a supply of lumps to chip into these primitive currier’s scrapers. Savages, that their fur robes or deer-skin shirts should not dry stiff, know how to dress the leather skilfully by such processes as rubbing in fat or marrow, and suppling with the hands; they also smoke it, to keep. Thus the North Americans know how to prepare deer-skin for garments into something like what we call chamois leather. But it hardly seems as though the lower races had taught themselves the process of actual tanning with bark or galls, where the tannic acid forms in the substance of the skin insoluble compounds which resist change for ages, so that the beautiful cut and embossed work in tanned leather from ancient Egypt may still be seen perfectly preserved in our museums. In such riding countries as Mexico, suits of leather are still worn, while in Europe the buff jerkin and the huntsman’s buckskins are disappearing; but it is still everywhere acknowledged that there is nothing like leather for covering the feet. In wearing furs, our height of luxury keeps curiously close to the savage fashion of the primitive world.
Plaiting and matting are arts of such simplicity that they are known to savages. In hot countries matting is convenient for dress, as when South Sea Islanders make gowns of plaited grass, and the old art still provides the civilized world with hats and bonnets of straw or chip. Next, if we pull a scrap of woven cloth to pieces, we see that it is in fact a piece of matting done with thread. Therefore, to understand weaving, we have to begin with the making of string or thread. All mankind can twist string, but some tribes do it in a far lower way than we are accustomed to. They take vegetable fibre, wool or hair, and twist it by rolling between their flat palms, or with one hand on the thigh. It is quite worth the reader’s while to try to imitate this process, by twisting two strands of tow, and then rolling these into one with the reverse movement. At any rate he will find how much practice he would take to do it as cleverly as the Australians when they have the women’s hair cut to furnish a supply of fishing-lines, or the New Zealanders when they run out a handful of native flax by inches into a neat and perfect cord. But the higher nations use a mechanical contrivance, the spindle, for thread-making, and the question is how this came to be invented. [Fig. 69] shows what may have happened. At a is figured a cross-stick, forming a simple reel or winder, on which the Australians wind their hair-string just mentioned. Now if it had occurred to one of these savages to secure his thread by drawing it into a split at the end of the stick, he might have seen that by giving the hanging reel a twirl he could make it twist a new strand for him much faster than he could do between his hands. The Australian never saw how to do this. But looking at b in the figure, which represents an ancient Egyptian woman spinning, it is evident that such a spindle as she is working with may have been invented by turning a mere reel to this new use. Such spindles were known over the ancient civilized world, and among the commonest objects dug up near old dwellings are the spindle-whorls of stone or terra-cotta, like great buttons, which with a stick through the middle formed the whole simple implement. Spindles may still be seen in the hands of peasant women in Italy or Switzerland. The spinning-wheel of the middle ages was a little machine to drive a spindle, and the spinning-frames in factories show the ancient instrument worked with still more modern improvements, a hundred spindles in a row being driven rapidly by steam-power, and all tended by a single operative.
Fig. 69.—a, Australian winder for hand-twisted cord; b, Egyptian woman spinning with the spindle.
