As a signal mark of his favour and affection, he would occasionally transfer some one, or another, of his most lasting ornaments to his mate, and the additional charm this would give her ensured a continuance of such gifts, and paved the way for tribal fashions. But then, as now among savages, the males take the lead in this matter of ornamentation, but in proportion as affection grows, they are transferred from him to her, so that among civilized races to-day, the custom is entirely reversed, the women, not the men, wearing the finery. So soon as families began to be neighbourly and to combine for the sake of company and mutual help, the spirit of rivalry, so essential to progress everywhere, would tend to increase the number of such gifts, and to set “fashions.” With the foundation of society “selection”—by the elimination of the unsocial, would ensure, not only the survival of such fashions, but their multiplication and diversification, producing results which, to our eyes, have often been hideous. The immediate effect of this form of selection, however, was not a change in physical characteristics, but in the evolution of personal ornaments and development of the æsthetic sense. Progress in this direction must have been infinitely slow, and the lower races of to-day furnish us with instructive object-lessons in its course. In many cases uglification rather than refinement has attended their efforts. It is indeed more than probable that the various types of ornamentation obtaining among savage races had their origin in outbursts of sexual exaltation. One of the earliest methods of personal decoration was probably to daub the body with paint, as is the custom during the performance of various religious and semi-religious rites among the Australian aborigines. A desire to find a permanent substitute for paint led to the practice of cicatrization, and the later and more refined custom of tattooing. But personal mutilation has taken many and strange forms, such as knocking out the front teeth, filing them to saw-like points, inserting gold or jewels, or staining them. No less extraordinary are the various types of lip and ear ornaments, and the suspension of ornaments from the nose. The various fashions of dressing the hair are also traceable to this origin.