to ascertain
whether it is true that it is one of those ornamentations which, as
Darwin would have us believe, help to determine the marriages of
mankind, or, as Westermarck puts it, "men and women began to... tattoo
themselves chiefly in order to make themselves attractive to the
opposite sex--that they might court successfully, or be courted." We
shall find that, on the contrary, tattooing has had from the earliest
recorded times more than a dozen practical purposes, and that its use
as a stimulant of the passion of the opposite sex probably never
occurred to a savage until it was suggested to him by a philosophizing
visitor.

Twenty-four centuries ago Herodotus not only noted that the Thracians
had punctures on their skins, but indicated the reason for them: they
are, he said, "a mark of nobility: to be without them is a testimony
of mean descent."[98] This use of skin disfigurements prevails among
the lower races to the present day, and it is only one of many
utilitarian and non-esthetic functions subserved by them. In his
beautifully illustrated volume on Maori tattooing, Major-General
Robley writes:

"Native tradition has it that their first settlers used to
mark their faces for battle with charcoal, and that the
lines on the face thus made were the beginnings of the
tattoo. To save the trouble of this constantly painting
their warlike decorations on the face, the lines were made
permanent. Hence arose the practice of carving the face and
the body with dyed incisions. The Rev. Mr. Taylor ...
assumes that the chiefs being of a lighter race, and having
to fight side by side with slaves of darker hues, darkened
their faces in order to appear of the same race."

TATTOOING ON PACIFIC ISLANDS

When Captain Cook visited New Zealand (1769) he was much interested in
the tattooing of the Maoris, and noted that each tribe seemed to have
a different custom in regard to it; thus calling attention to one of
its main functions as a means to distinguish the tribes from each
other. He described the different patterns on divers parts of the body
used by various tribes, and made the further important observation
that "by adding to the tattooing they grow old and honorable at the
same time." The old French navigator d'Urville found in the Maori
tattooing an analogy to European heraldry, with this difference: that
whereas the coat-of-arms attests the merits of ancestors, the Ma