In conformity with other ornaments, what we consider decent covering is said to be more common with savage men than with women. “If dress were the result of a feeling of shame,” Professor Waitz observes, “we should expect it to be more indispensable to woman than to man, which is not the case.”[1206] In America, according to v. Humboldt—among the Caribs, for instance—the men are often more decently clothed than the women.[1207] The same is stated of the Nagas of Upper Assam;[1208] and Barth, who had a vast experience of African savages, remarks, “I have observed that many heathen tribes consider a covering, however poor and scanty it may be, more necessary for man than woman.”[1209] Whether this is the rule among savage peoples is doubtful. At any rate, the egoism of the men cannot be blamed for the nakedness of the women. For a savage Eve may pluck her clothes from the trees. In support of the psychological presumption which underlies the hypothesis here adduced, it may be added that some peoples are in the habit of covering other parts of the body also, in order to “excite through the unknown.” Thus, among the Tipperahs, the married women wear nothing but a short petticoat, while the unmarried girls cover the breast with a gaily-dyed cloth with fringed ends.[1210] Among the Toungtha, the bosoms of women are left uncovered after the birth of the first child, but the unmarried girls wear a narrow breast cloth.[1211] The Chinese consider small feet to be the chief charm of their women, and the girls have to undergo horrible torture while their feet are being compressed to the smallest possible size. It might be supposed that they would at least have the pleasure of fascinating the men by a beauty so painfully acquired. But Dr. Stricker assures us that, in China, a woman is considered immodest if she shows her artificially distorted foot to a man. It is even improper to speak of a woman’s foot, and in decent pictures this part is always concealed under the dress.[1212] The women of Agades, according to Barth, generally go unveiled, and if they sometimes cover their heads, this is done rather from coquetry than from a feeling of shame.[1213] Mr. Man remarks that a Hindu woman who attempts to hide her face, while she wears a gauze which displays her whole form, in her simulated modesty always appears as if attempting to convey an _arrière pensée_.[1214] Among the Tacullies, it is customary for the girls to have over their eyes a kind of veil or fringe, made either of strung beads or of narrow strips of deer skin garnished with porcupine quills;[1215] and, among the Chawanons, according to Moore, those young women who have any pretensions to beauty, as soon as they become marriageable, “muffle themselves up so that when they go abroad it is impossible to see anything but their eyes. On these indications of beauty they are eagerly sought in marriage.”[1216]