It was thus sufficiently demonstrated that the wearing of clothes is not even essential for the display of feminine vanity and coquetry. Artifice can dispense with clothing, and if the sexes in this strange land attract each other by means that seem curious and unaccountable to us, the end in view is always and among all peoples the same, the continuance of the race.
It must be remembered, too, that the development of a fashion is similar to the development of a living organism. A certain form of dress or style of decoration undergoes successive transformations, the stages being generally exaggeration, diminution and ultimate disappearance. For illustration we need go no further afield than the recent vagaries of fashion in Europe which seem to oscillate between the bell and the asparagus, but perhaps a more striking example is the long, pointed shoes of the Middle Ages. At first the points were quite reasonably short. Then little by little each man tried to sort himself out of the common ruck of his neighbours by having longer points, and after about a century the fashion culminated in the absurd extravagance of the shoe with points long enough to be drawn upwards and fastened to the knee. The mode first saw the light in the middle of the thirteenth century and disappeared abruptly in 1428. The same evolution can be traced in the progress of the ruff of the fifteenth century and the crinoline of the nineteenth.
It is at least open to belief that ethnical transformations are governed by similar laws. This distension of the lobe must be traced to the practice of continually adding to the number of ornaments with which the ear was overloaded.
Every individual tends to overrate the feature which is considered the characteristic of his race. "Le beau pour le crapaud c'est sa crapaude," said Voltaire, and the natural instinct of the savage is to exaggerate what he regards as the most worthy of admiration. This instinct is indubitably responsible for most of the mutilation practised by primitive peoples. Thus the negresses of Africa produce an artificial elongation of the nipple by the sting of a certain insect, and the platyrrhine Malays make their flat noses even flatter, while the Persians take the most elaborate pains to induce an extreme hook on a nose already aquiline. This theory of exaggeration inherent in our nature can alone explain certain customs which are otherwise unaccountable.
[ A Moï Maiden with Enlarged Ears. ]
[A Cham Chief and his Daughter.]
