William Henry Flower

“ The study of the works of our earliest known forefathers, "prehistoric archaeology," as it is commonly called, although one of the most recently developed branches of knowledge, is now almost a science by itself, and one which is receiving a great amount of attention in all parts of the civilized world. It investigates the origin of all human culture, endeavors to trace to their common beginning the sources of all our arts, customs, and history. ”

“ Even among these uncultured children of nature, human pride crops up among the fetters of fashion, which, indeed, are fetters in the worst sense of the word; for fashion in the distant wilds of Africa tortures and harasses poor humanity as much as in the great prison of civilization. ”

“ ONE of the great difficulties with regard to making anthropology a special subject of study, and devoting a special organization to its promotion, is the multifarious nature of the branches of knowledge comprehended under the title. This very ambition, which endeavors to include such an extensive range of knowledge, ramifying in all directions, illustrating and receiving light from so many other sciences, appears often to overleap itself and give a looseness and indefiniteness to the aims of the individual or the institution proposing to cultivate it. ”

“ I HAVE to ask your attention this evening to certain outward manifestations of a propensity common to human nature in every aspect in which we are acquainted with it—the most primitive and barbarous, and the most civilized and refined—but one which is, as far as I know, peculiar to human nature. ”

“ I shall speak of deformity in the sense of alteration of the natural form of any part of the body, and those cases of voluntary deformation will be considered which are performed, not by isolated individuals, or with special motives, but by considerable numbers of members of a community in imitation of one another—in fact, according to fashion, "that most inexorable tyrant, to which the greater part of mankind are willing slaves."
Fashion is now often associated with change, but in more primitive communities fashions of all sorts are more permanent than with us ”

“ All we know of the origin of limbs shows that they commence as outgrowths upon the surface of the body, and that the first-formed portions are the most distal segments. The limb, as proved by its permanent state in the lowest vertebrates, and by its embryological condition in higher forms, is at first a mere projection or outward fold of the skin, which, in the course of development, as it becomes of use in moving or supporting the animal, acquires the internal framework which strengthens it and perfects its functions. ”

“ When it once became an established custom in any tribe, it was almost inevitable that it should continue, until put an end to by the destruction either of the tribe itself, or of its peculiar institutions, through the intervention of some superior force, for a standard of excellence in form, which could not be changed in those who possessed it, was naturally followed by all who did not wish their children to run the risk of the social degradation which would follow the neglect of such a custom. ”

“ It seems perfectly marvelous that any one who had ever looked at a healthy pair of human feet could have thought of the possibility of wearing a stiff, unyielding shoe of identical form for both right and left, and yet the very trifling difference which is at present allowed is a comparatively modern innovation, and is even now too frequently disregarded, especially where most needed, as in the case of children. ”

“ The external adornment of the body, the costume, the ornaments, the mutilations which individuals undergo—in short, the general fashions—have all a distinctive character of their own. The most remarkable is the revolting, because unnatural, manner in which the women pierce and distort their lips; they seem to vie with each other in their mutilations, and their vanity in this respect, I believe, surpasses anything that may be found throughout Africa. ”

“ It seems, indeed, a strange phenomenon that in such different races, so far removed in locality, customs so singular—to our ideas so revolting and unnatural, and certainly so painful and inconvenient—should either have been perpetuated for an enormous lapse of time, if the supposition of a common origin be entertained, or else have developed themselves independently. ”

“ Ethnology thus treats of the resemblances and differences of the modifications of the human species in their relations to each other, but anthropology, as now understood, has a far wider scope. It treats of mankind as a whole. It investigates his origin and his relations to the rest of the universe. It invokes the aid of the sciences of zoölogy, comparative anatomy, and physiology ”

“ There is no other race of men which have heads in the least resembling theirs. At first, usage was the principal cause of the length of their head, but now Nature coöperates with usage. They think those the most noble who have the longest heads. It is thus with regard to the usage: immediately after the child is born, and while its head is still tender, they fashion it with their hands, and constrain it to assume a lengthened shape by applying bandages and other suitable contrivances, whereby the spherical form of the head is destroyed, and it is made to increase in length. ”

“ All these questions, then, should be carefully studied by those who have any share in the government of people of races alien to themselves. A knowledge of their special characters and relations to one another has a more practicable object than the mere gratification of scientific curiosity; it is a knowledge upon which the happiness and prosperity, or the reverse, of millions of our fellow-creatures may depend. ”

“ Many naturalists have been tempted to think that the whales represent a still further stage of the same kind of modification. But there is to my mind a fatal objection to this view. The seal, of course, has much in common with the whale, inasmuch as it is a mammal adapted for an aquatic life, but it has been converted to its general fish-like form by the peculiar development of its hind-limbs into instruments of propulsion through the water; for, though the thighs and legs are small, the feet are large and are the special organs of locomotion in the water, the tail being quite rudimentary. ”

“ When we see identical and most strange customs, such as particular modes of mutilation of the body, showing themselves among races the most diverse in character and remote geographically, we can not help coming to the conclusion that these customs have either been communicated in some hitherto unexplained manner, or are the outcome of some common element of humanity, in either of which cases they tell nothing of the special relations or affinities of the races which practice them. ”

“ Whatever might be the case with regard to the hair, the ears, the nose, and lips, or even the teeth, it might have been thought that the actual shape of the head, as determined by the solid skull, would not have been considered a subject to be modified according to the fashion of the time and place. Such, however, is far from being the case. The custom of artificially changing the form of the head is one of the most ancient and widespread with which we are acquainted. ”

“ Its importance to those who have to rule—and there are few of us now who are not called upon to bear our share of the responsibility of government—can scarcely be overestimated in an empire like this, the population of which is composed of examples of almost every diversity under which the human body can manifest itself. ”

“ FEW natural groups present so many remarkable illustrations of several of the most important general laws which appear to have determined the structure of animal bodies as that of the whales. We find the effects of the two opposing forces—that of heredity or conformation to ancestral characters, and that of adaptation to changed environment, whether brought about by the method of natural selection or otherwise—distinctly written in almost every part of their structure. ”

“ It is a remarkable thing that an almost exactly similar custom still prevails among a tribe of Indians inhabiting the southern part of Brazil—the Botocudos, so called from a Portuguese word meaning a plug or stopper. Among these people the lip-ornament consists of a conical piece of hard and polished wood, frequently weighs a quarter of a pound, and drags down, elongates, and everts the lower lip, so as to expose the gums and teeth, in a manner which to our taste is hideous, but with them is considered an essential adjunct to an attractive and correct appearance. ”

“ Since some of the leading shoemakers have ventured to deviate a little from the conventional shape, those persons who can afford to be specially fitted are better off as a rule than the majority of poorer people, who, although caring less for appearance, and being more dependent for their livelihood upon the physical welfare of their bodies, are obliged to wear ready-made shoes of the form that an inexorable custom has prescribed. ”

“ Though the science of language is an essential part of ethnology, and one which generally absorbs almost the entire energies of any one who cultivates it, its place in discriminating racial affinities is unquestionably below that of physical characters. ”

“ It may here be mentioned that the modification of the mouth-structure of the right whale is entirely in relation to its food. It is by this apparatus that it is enabled to avail itself of the minute but highly nutritious crustaceans and pteropods which swarm in immense shoals in the seas it frequents. The large mouth enables it to take in at one time a sufficient quantity of water filled with these small organisms, and the length and delicate structure of the baleen make it an efficient strainer or hair sieve by which the water can be drained off. ”

“ And when we have to do with people still more widely removed from ourselves—African negroes, American Indians, Australian or Pacific islanders—it seems almost impossible to find any common ground of union or modus vivendi; the mere contact of the races generally ends in the extermination of one of them. ”

“ The Malays, however, excel the Africans, both in the universality and in the fantastic variety of their supposed improvements upon nature. While the natural whiteness of the surface of these organs is always admired by us, and by most people, the Malays take the greatest pains to stain their teeth black, which they consider greatly adds to their beauty. White teeth are looked upon with perfect disgust by the Dyaks of the neighborhood of Sarawak. In addition to staining the teeth, filing the surface in some way or other is almost always resorted to. ”

“ Men whose heads have been deformed to an extraordinary extent, as Concomly, a Chinook chief, whose skull is preserved in the museum at Haslar Hospital, have often risen by their own abilities to considerable local eminence, and the fact that the relative social position of the chiefs, in whose families the heads are always deformed, and the slaves on whom it is never permitted, is constantly maintained, proves that the former evince no decided inferiority in intelligence or energy. ”

“ Although the American Indians, living a healthy life in their native wilds, and under physical conditions which cause all bodily lesions to occasion far less constitutional or local disturbance than is the case with people living under the artificial conditions and the accummulated predisposition to disease which civilization entails, thus appear to suffer little, if at all, from this unnatural treatment, it seems to be otherwise with the French, on whom its effects have been watched by medical observers more closely than it can have been on the savages in America. ”

“ Thus habitually carrying the child on one arm appears to produce an obliquity in the form of the skull which is retained to a greater or less degree all through life. The practice followed by nomadic people of carrying their infants fastened to stiff pillows or boards, commonly causes a flattening of the occiput; and the custom of dressing the child's head with tightly fitting bandages, still common in many parts of the Continent, and even used in England within the memory of many living people, produces an elongated and laterally constricted form. ”

“ In the whales the hind-limbs are aborted and the tail developed into a powerful swimming organ. Now, it is very difficult to suppose that, when the hind-limbs had once become so well adapted to a function so essential to the welfare of the animal as that of swimming, they could ever have become reduced and their action transferred to the tail. It is far more reasonable to suppose that whales were derived from animals with large tails, which were used in swimming, eventually with such effect that the hind-limbs became no longer necessary, and so gradually disappeared. ”