No extraordinary claims can be made for the beauty of the Hottentot women. They have the knotty hair that characterizes the negro races, and the flat noses, thick lips, and prominent cheekbones. While their faces have no especial beauty, their figures, when maidens, are regular, plump and attractive; but after the first years of womanhood are past, the roundness of youth yields to the wrinkles of age, and all attractiveness disappears, the woman either becoming withered and haggard, or manifesting that peculiar development said to be so much admired among the Hottentots, known to science as steatopyga. The famous "Hottentot Venus" furnishes an example of this type of _beauty_. The back is given a most remarkable contour by the enormous growth of fat about the hips, which, though hard and firm, shakes like jelly when our Venus walks. This extraordinary development has to the Hottentot lady not only an æsthetic but also a utilitarian value, in case she cares to support her infant upon it. The less cultured a people, the greater the place given by it to ornament. Among many uncivilized peoples the men as well as the women exhibit a fondness for decoration; but ornamentation is preëminently the weakness of women. Although the savage lady regards clothing as altogether an unnecessary burden, she must have her ornaments. One of the methods of ornamentation is that of tattooing the body. Among some tribes almost the whole body is covered with more or less artistic designs, while others mark only parts of the body, as by rings around the arms, or, as among the aboriginal New Zealand women, by puncture of the lips. The use of shells, metal rings, bands, beads, feathers, mats, and so on _ad infinitum_, is one of the marks of savagery.