Fig. 190.—Hair-pin with curled Head.
The round-headed pins are sometimes massive in shape and unornamented, that is, exactly similar to the bone pins of the Stone Age; sometimes, and even more frequently, they are perforated with one or more round holes and adorned with a few chasings.
The flat-headed pins differ very much in the diameter of the button at the end, which is sometimes of considerable size. There are some, the head of which is nothing more than a small enlargement of the pin, and others, in which there are two or three of these enlargements, placed a little way apart and separated by a twist. Their sizes are very various, and in some cases are so exaggerated, that it is quite evident that the objects cannot have been used as hair-pins. In Colonel Schwab's collection, there is one 33 inches long, and M. Troyon has mentioned some 20 and 24 inches long.
At the Exposition Universelle of 1867, in the collection sent by M. Desor, the visitors' admiration might have been called forth by some of the pins which had been repolished by the care of the learned Swiss naturalist. They were certainly very elegant, and ladies of the present day might well have decorated themselves with these ornaments, although they dated back to an era so many thousands of years ago.
Among many savage tribes, the dressing of the hair, especially among the men, is carried to an excessively elaborate pitch. The head of hair of an Abyssinian soldier forms a species of lofty system of curls which is meant to last a whole lifetime. He carries with him a long pin, furnished with a thick button, owing to the impossibility of reaching his skin through his coiffure with the extremities of his fingers.
In the same way the New Zealanders wear an enormous "chignon," 2 feet high and ornamented with ribbons.
The Chinese and the Japanese also devote excessive attention to the dressing of their hair.
It is, therefore, probable that the inhabitants of the lacustrine villages, both men and women, devoted an immense amount of care to the cultivation of their coiffure. In the tombs of the bronze epoch, pins have been found 2½ feet in length, with large knobs or buttons at the end, similar to those used by the Abyssinian soldiers of our own day. The combs, which resembled those of the present New Zealanders, although 6 inches long, had only six to eight teeth, and must have been better fitted to scratch their heads than to dress their hair.