dress consisted simply of a turban and a waistcloth, adding significantly, he did not look indecent, for dark colour almost removes the impression of nudity.22 By the majority of American Indians clothes are replaced by skin painting. Where this is the case, shame is felt by women and men if they are seen unpainted. A. von Humboldt, to whom we owe this observation, adds that on the Orinoco the extreme of poverty is expressed by saying, "The man is so wretched that he cannot paint his half body." 23 Tattooing, which is another substitute for raiment, consists of drawings on the body, produced either by the injection of coloured pigments under the skin, or by the artificial formation of raised scars. That it actually takes away from the impression of nudity is declared by all who have seen fully tattooed Albanese. Tattooing may still be seen in every quarter of the world with the exception of Europe. In the South Sea Islands it not only serves as ornament where it extends to covered portions of the body, and where the etched drawings represent emblems of the deities, but has a religious signification. That clothing frequently serves only for personal adornment or is worn as a protection from cold, is proved by the case of the well-clad Maori of New Zealand, who have no notion of decency. 24 This applies to the highly civilized Japanese, among whom the bathing of both sexes in common, in enclosed areas as well as in the open air, has only recently been prohibited by the authorities.25 The Eskimo, who in the winter are enveloped to the face in furs, nevertheless, according to Kane's strongly expressed description, completely lay aside their garments in their subterranean dwellings, and the demeanour of the wife of Hans the Eskimo, on board Hayes's ship, plainly shows that she had no idea of decency. G. G. Winkler 26 found that even the Christian and thoroughly conventional population of Iceland had not yet arrived at the perception which the scriptural parents of the human species had already acquired in the Garden of Eden. These facts ought to render us extremely cautious in estimating 22 Reiseskizzen. 23 Reisen in den Aequinoctialgegenden. 24 Waitz, Anthropologie, vol. i. p. 357. 26 Iceland, p. 107. the moral worth of a people by its standard of bodily covering. But although, as we have shown, chastity and morality are quite independent of the absence or vividness of sexual modesty, yet in every nation, the awakening of this latter feeling is a mark of progress. Before the idea of covering himself dawned on any human being, he must have discriminated between the beautiful and the ugly. For clothing we are therefore indebted to the earliest æsthetic emotions experienced by the human species, and in so far as reverence for the beautiful has an ennobling effect upon us, these emotions promoted the education of mankind. Correlatively with the decline of rigid morals at ancient Rome, arose a contempt for the maxims of propriety. The desire for clothing is first awakened by the consciousness of a higher dignity, which urges man to endeavour to increase the separation between himself and animals. It is not mere vanity endeavouring, it may be, to hide the loss of youthful charms, for at a much earlier period a wish is felt to throw a veil over, so to speak, unmerited degradations imposed upon us by the constitution of our animal body, and the desire arises to appear before others as if we were as pure and pleasant to the sight as the lilies of the Gospel. Notwithstanding all the strange freaks of the sense of modesty which we have just recounted, the majority of people have known exactly what most required covering. The sensitiveness of the women of ancient Lydia is known from the narrative of the wife of Candaules, as given by Herodotus; 27 and how carefully the modesty of the female sex is guarded by the Mandanas in North America, is told by Catlin. 28 Among the semi-Papuan inhabitants of the Palawan Islands, the women have an unlimited privilege of striking, fining, or, if it be done on the spot, killing every man who makes his way into their bathing-places. 29 We find traces of clothing as far back as the so-called reindeer period of Europe. Bone needles were discovered in the caves of Périgord; and a similar discovery in the stratum of relics of civilization in the source of the Schussen, shows that the inhabitants of Suabia knew how to sew even in the glacial period. But in both 27 Lib. i. cap. 8-12. 28 Die Indianer Nordamerika's. 29 Karl Semper, Die Palauinseln. 1873. Materials of Clothing. 177 cases, the occurrence of lumps of vermilion pigment points to the co-existence of skin painting. The material of clothing always depended on the food of each race. Thus among hunters and shepherds the skins of slaughtered animals were used. But it is instructive to notice that human invention has devised the same expedients in widely distant places, as we have already shown. The simplest form of dress consists of leaves or twigs stuck into a girdle. In other places reeds or rushes are strung upon the girdle as is done by the Papuan women of New Guinea and the Pelew Islands. As it was necessary to renew these rushes too frequently, they were replaced by bands of bass or strips of leather; this was the origin of the fringed girdle worn by the females of the Mohave tribes and their neighbours on the Colorado in North America, by the Fijians in the South Sea, where it is called Liku, by the New Caledonians, and the Kaffirs. The Tapa is exclusively Polynesian; this, as is well known, is the bark of the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera) beaten to make it soft. Where refinement had begun and higher pretensions had arisen, the plaiting of baskets and mats led to weaving. When the Polynesian Maori migrated to New Zealand they brought with them the secret of the manufacture of mats. In their new abode they found an excellent fibrous material in the leafy tufts of the Phormium tenax, or New Zealand flax, and they invented for themselves the art of preparing and manufacturing a sort of linen. The use of cotton has been discovered in both worlds, for the natives of America independently discovered the process of twisting the threads which they found at home, and of converting these threads into a tissue. Cotton was also indigenous in ancient Egypt and was woven into stuffs.30 Still the preference for linen kept it completely in the background. Cotton was naturalized from the earliest ages even in Syria. The English word cotton is derived from keton which, with small variations in the vowels, signifies cotton in all Semitic languages, and is still kutn in modern Arabic.3 Phoenician 30 G. Ebers, Durch Gosen zum Sinai. 31 H. Brandes, Antike Namen der Baumwolle. 5th Jahrsbericht der Ver. für Erdkunde. Leipzic, 1866. N sailors therefore conveyed not linen but cotton fabrics under the name of Kitonet, or Ketonet, to the Grecian ports, and from this term arose words such as xv and Kiowν. The word linum (flax) originally vaguely used in Latin and Greek, passed, with little alteration from its Latin form, to the Basque, Celtic, and Germanic languages 32 and thus appears to have spread from South-eastern to Northern and Western Europe. If spindle wheels have been found in the Danish middens, and if the weaver's bench already stood in the lake dwellings of Switzerland,33 the art of spinning and weaving must have originated at an age so remote that it can no longer be decided which tribe or which race was the first discoverer Hemp is certainly an acquisition for which civilization is indebted to the so-called barbarous nations. The cultivation of hemp was found by Herodotus even among the Medo-Persic Scyths.34 A. Bacmeister confidently maintained that Hemd, Hut, Haube, Schuhe, Rock, and Hosen (shirt, hat, cap, shoes, coat, trousers), are primordial words in the German language.35 It is noteworthy that the use of trousers first spread from Northern Europe to the classical shores of the Mediterranean and then over the whole world. But even this article of dress has been invented in various places. All Northern Asiatics wear trousers, and have worn them in the most remote ages of which we have any knowledge. Even if we suppose that in their emigration to America the Eskimo brought this novelty with them from their western home, we yet find the same garment in use among the Red Indians in the northern parts of the New World. The American aborigines had one small advantage over the old civilized nations, in that they were already in the habit of manufacturing an excellent covering for the foot; these were not sandals, but half-boots or mocassins. It is remarkable that the Patagonians, in the extreme south of the New World, also use mocassins, whereas they are unknown in Central America and the other parts of South 32 Von Hehn, Kulturpflanzen und Hausthiere. 33 See above, and Wilhelm Baer, Der vorgeschichtliche Mensch. 84 Lib. iv. cap. 74. 35 Ausland, 1871. Hemd is certainly derived from iuatiov. America. It was among the barbarians that the Romans first saw shoes; the idols of the old Egyptians are also barefooted. Shoes and sandals were also entirely wanting in Babylon, where, however, to judge from the cylindrical seal of King Uruch (2326 B.C.), great luxury in dress must have been customary.36 Barefooted nations are still everywhere to be found in low latitudes, whereas in regions of perpetual snow, where it freezes, or where the ground is greatly chilled by radiation, the necessity of protection for the feet must soon suggest itself. In Africa, sandals are used by the Mandingo negroes of Musardo,37 and, strange to say, by the otherwise naked Bari negroes of the White Nile, 38 the Kissama in Angola,39 the Kaffirs 4o as well as by other Bantu negroes, and by the Hottentots.41 As many animals, and even inferior animals, provide themselves with an artificial protection against the vicissitudes of the weather, and no race of mankind has been found without a shelter of some sort, the instinct of building must be as old as our race itself. It is in caves that we meet with the first traces of our ancestors, but we must not therefore infer that these natural refuges, which exist moreover only in rocky districts and especially in calcareous mountains, were the earliest dwelling-places of man, or first suggested the idea of constructing artificial shelter. When the Bushmen are away from their caves during their excursions, they cover themselves with sand whenever they spend the night in the open air, or weave a shelter of branches and brushwood for themselves in the thicket. In the temperate season the Australians shelter themselves from the wind by screens of foliage, but at other times they stretch pieces of bark, often 12 feet in length, and from 8 to 10 feet wide, over a dome-shaped framework something like a tent.42 A similar summer tent of birch 36 G. Rawlinson, Great Monarchies, vol. i. p. 107. 37 Anderson's Journey to Musardo, in the Transactions of the Geographical Society of Vienna. 1871. 38 W. von Harnier's Reisen am obern Nil. 39 Hamilton, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. i. 40 G. Fritsch, Eingeborne Südafrika's. 41 Kolbe, Kap der Guten Hoffnung. 42 Dumont d'Urville, Voyage de l'Astrolabe. |