And yet, to prove how conventional all this sentiment of modesty is, it is only necessary to say that the Japanese are shocked to see the nude in works of art;[203] that it is as indecent for a Chinese woman to show her foot as for a European woman to expose the most intimate parts of her body; that a Mussulman woman surprised in the bath by indiscreet eyes hastens before anything else to hide her face, the rest of the body being exposed to view without any great shock to modesty; that a European woman could never uncover her breast in the street and does it in a ballroom, etc.
FIG. 48.—Ufhtaradeka, typical Fuegian with primitive mantle of seal-skin;
height, 1 m. 56; ceph. ind., 79.1.
(Phot. of the Scientific Miss. of Cape Horn, Coll. Mus. Nat. Hist., Paris.)
Starting from the primordial nudity of mankind, we are led to inquire what was the motive which prompted men to clothe themselves. In countries with a rigorous climate it was the necessity of protecting themselves from cold and damp, but in the other parts of the world this has not been the case. The sentiment of vanity, the desire of being different from others, of pleasing, of inspiring with horror, begot ornaments which became transformed little by little into dress.
Adornment of the Body.—Strange as it may appear at the outset, the fact that ornament preceded dress is well established in ethnography. It is, moreover, often difficult to draw the boundary-line between the two. Thus the first and most primitive mode of personal adornment is certainly that in which the body itself is adorned without the putting on of any extraneous objects whatsoever. And the most simple of these primitive adornments, the daubing of the body with colouring matter, may also be considered as one of the first garments. Almost all peoples who go naked practise this mode of adornment (Figs. [59] and [124]), but it is held in special esteem on the American continent. The colours most used are red, yellow, white, and black, yielded by such substances as ochre, the juice of certain plants, chalk, lime, and charcoal. Certain tribes of the Amazon basin fix a covering of feathers on their body, daubed with a sticky substance. The painting of the face (Figs. [158] and [159]) is colouring only of a modified form. Thibetan women coat their face over with a thick layer of paste or starch, which with a refinement of coquetry they inlay with certain seeds arranged so as to form designs more or less artistic, without interfering with the red spots on the cheeks made with the juice of certain berries. Chinese women only put a thin coating of rice-starch without seeds, and the Javanese women, like our ladies of fashion, are content with rice powder. The red spots on the cheeks of Mongolian and Thibetan women are the prototypes of the paint which spoils so unnecessarily the fresh complexion and the faces, naturally so beautiful, of the women of Southern Europe (Spain, Serbia, Roumania).
FIG. 49.—Ainu woman tattooed round the lips.
The custom of applying lac to the teeth, in vogue among the Malays, the Chinese, and the Annamese; the colouring of the lips so generally practised from Japan to Europe; the dyeing of the nails and the hair with “henna” (Lawsonia inermis) in Persia and Asia Minor; lastly, the painting of the eyebrows and eyelashes in the east, the dyeing of the hair in the west, are various manifestations of this same mode of primitive adornment.