may not behold the face of her future husband before she reaches the bridal chamber. In Melanesia, the bride is carried to her new home on some one's back, wrapped in many mats, with palm-fans held about her face, because she is supposed to be modest and shy. Among the Damaras, the groom cannot see his bride for four days after marriage. When a Damara woman is asked in marriage, she covers her face for a time with the flap of a headdress made for this purpose. At the Thlinkeet marriage ceremony, the bride must look down, and keep her head bowed all the time; during the wedding-day, she remains hiding in a corner of the house, and the groom is forbidden to enter. At a Yezedee marriage, the bride is covered from head to foot with a thick veil, and when arrived at her new home, she retires behind a curtain in the corner of a darkened room, where she remains for three days before her husband is permitted to see her. In Corea, the bride has to cover her face with her long sleeves, when meeting the bridegroom at the wedding. The Manchurian bride uncovers her face for the first time when she descends from the nuptial couch. It is dangerous even to see dangerous persons. Sight is a method of contagion in primitive science, and the idea coincides with the psychological aversion to see dangerous things, and with sexual shyness and timidity. In the customs noticed, we can distinguish the feeling that it is dangerous to the bride for her husband's eyes to be upon her, and the feeling of bashfulness in her which induces her neither to see him nor to be seen by him. These ideas explain the origin of the bridal veil and similar concealments. The bridal veil is used, to take a few instances, in China, Burmah, Corea, Russia, Bulgaria, Manchuria, and Persia, and in all these cases it conceals the face entirely." (E. Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_, pp. 328 et seq.) Alexander Walker, writing in 1846, remarks: "Among old-fashioned people, of whom a good example may be found in old country people of the middle class in England, it is indecent to be seen with the head unclothed; such a woman is terrified at the chance of being seen In that condition, and if intruded on at that time, she shrieks with terror, and flies to conceal herself." (A. Walker, _Beauty_, p. 15.) This fear of being seen with the head uncovered exists still, M. Van Gennep informs me, in some regions of France, as in Brittany.