The ‘fairer’ half of black world is not less note-worthy. There is the tall and sooty-skinned woman from Uhiáo, distinguished by the shape of her upper lip. A thorn-pierced hole is enlarged with stalks of green reed till it can admit a disk of white-painted wood nearly as big as a dollar. The same is the system of the Dors, the tribe dwelling north of the equator and west of the Nile; their lip-plates equal the thick end of a cheroot; and the ‘pelele’ of the southern regions is a similar disk of bamboo, ivory, or tin, which causes the upper lip to project some two inches beyond the nose-tip, giving it an anserine proportion. In the elder women the ornament is especially hideous. As a rule, the South American ‘Indians’ pierce for their labrets the lower lip, evidently the more unclean fashion—no wonder that kissing (should I say osculation?) is unknown. Yet even amongst the Somal, if you attempt to salute a woman—supposing that you have the right—she will draw back in horror from the act of incipient cannibalism. Often the lip-disk is absent, and then through the unsightly gap a pearly tooth is seen to gleam, set off by the outer darkness of ‘Spoonbill’s’ skin. This woman, broad- shouldered and thick-waisted, is almost as stalwart as her Mhiás, whose tattoo (chale) is a single line forked at both ends:[25] in others the cuticle and cutis are branded, worked, and raised in an intricate embroidery over all the muscular trunk. An abnormal equality of strength and stature between the sexes prevails amongst many African tribes, especially the agricultural, where women are the workers. The same may be observed in parts of North Britain and of northern Europe. The difference in this matter between the Teutonic and the Latin races never struck me so strongly as when seeing German families land at Rio de Janeiro.