The facts stated seem to show that the object of tattooing,[1085] as well as of other kinds of self-decoration or mutilation, was to stimulate the sexual desire of the opposite sex. To us it appears strange that such repugnant practices as that of perforating the septum of the nose or removing teeth should owe their origin to coquetry, but we must not judge of the taste of savages by our own. In this case the desire for self-decoration is to a great extent identical with the wish to attract attention, to excite by means of the charm of novelty.[1086] At all stages of civilization people like a slight variety, but deviations from what they are accustomed to see must not be too great, nor of such a kind as to provoke a disagreeable association of ideas. In Cochin China, where the women blacken their teeth, a man said of the wife of the English Ambassador contemptuously that “she had white teeth like a dog;”[1087] and the Abipones in South America, who carefully plucked out all the hairs with which our eyes are naturally protected, despised the Europeans for their thick eyebrows, and called them brothers to the ostriches, who have very thick brows.[1088] We, on the other hand, would dislike to see a woman with a crystal or a piece of wood in her lip. It is a common notion that women are by nature vainer and more addicted to dressing and decorating themselves than men. This certainly does not hold good for savage and barbarous peoples in general. It is true that, among many of them, tattooing is exclusively or predominantly limited to the women, and that the men sometimes wear fewer ornaments. But several travellers, as for instance Dr. Schweinfurth[1089] and Dr. Barth,[1090] who have a vast experience of African races, agree that the reverse is usually the case. The women of all the tribes of Indians Richardson saw on his route through the northern parts of the fur countries, adorned their persons less than the men of the same tribes; and the like is said of the Comanches.[1091] Among the Uaupés, Mr. Wallace observed “that the men and boys appropriated all the ornaments.”[1092] The native women of Orangerie Bay of New Guinea, except that they are tattooed, adorn themselves less than the men, and none of them paint their faces and bodies, as the men frequently do.[1093] In the Admiralty Islands, young girls “sometimes have a necklace or two on, but they never are decorated to the extent to which the men are,” it being evidently not considered good taste for them to adorn their persons.[1094] Among the aborigines of the New Hebrides, New Hanover, New Ireland,[1095] and Australia,[1096] adornments are almost entirely monopolised by the men, the “fair sex” being content with their natural charms.