One of the things most commonly forgotten by those who wonder at the
strange “taste” of savages is that many of their customs have nothing
whatever to do with the sense of beauty. The habit of putting on
“war-paint” originated not in a desire for ornamentation, but in the
wish to make themselves frightful in appearance to the enemy. For the
same reason heads are mutilated. As Waitz notes in speaking of Tahiti:
“A very ugly mutilation is that to which most of the boys had to subject
themselves. Immediately after birth their mothers compressed their
forehead and the back of the head, so that the former became narrow and
high, the latter flat; this was done to make their aspect more terrible,
and thus turn them into more formidable warriors.” Tattooing, likewise,
was originally intended to be an easy sign of recognition, or of social
or religious distinction, rather than an ornament of the body. And when
we consider how prone the mind of our own fashionable ladies is to
violate every canon of good taste in their wild effort to surpass one
another in some novel extravagance just from Paris; when we note that if
a Fifth Avenue lady wears a gull on her hat, her coloured cook will
invest in a turkey or ostrich for hers, we understand at once that many
of the mutilations approved by savages are the outcome of vanity and
emulation, not of æsthetic taste.