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Photographic view of the site of the tomb of Perneb. Party of excavators in foreground.

in the heart of the jungle have special paints and dyes which they use for beautifying purposes. In his "Expedition into the Interior of Africa" (vol. II), he tells us that the Felatah ladies in Central Africa are accustomed to devote several hours a day to their personal appearance. At night, he says, they wrap their fingers and toes in henna leaves so that by morning they are a beautiful purple. The eyelids are pencilled with sulphuret of antimony. The hair is coloured carefully with indigo. What Mr. Laird tells us of the Felatah ladies other authorities tell us of other savages who live in widely separated parts of the world. Even the most crude and primitive peoples have methods of beautifying themselves according to their own particular standards.

After the Christian Era the use of cosmetics was for several centuries more pronounced in Italy than elsewhere. Indeed, so extreme did the use of paints and powders and special ointments become that the Italian monks were moved to complain that "the ladies of Italy are immodest and dishonest for they try to cheat Nature herself, spending hours in the sunshine, after anointing their hair with some secret ointment." This "secret ointment" by the way, has been discovered:

Take dried cauls, from the Orient, grind them to powder, and mix in equal proportions with the yolks of eggs that have been boiled; then mix with wild honey. Rub on the hair in the evening, wrap the head in a kerchief and wash in the morning with olive oil soap and fresh water.

The user is further advised to sit in the sun all day after using the ointment, "being careful not to get sunstroke."

The custom of powdering the hair originated in Venice. In Venice too, about 1500, the custom of wearing beauty patches came into style. False hair of all kinds was worn, and a sort of gum pomade was used to keep it in place.

The 17th century in France saw an extravagant use of cosmetics of all kinds. Rouges and powders were used to such extremes that La Bruyère says:

If their wish is to be pleasing to men, if it is for the men's sake that they lay on their white and red paint, I have inquired into the matter and I can tell them that in the opinion of men the use of white paint and rouge makes them hideous and disgusting; and that rouge by itself, both ages and disguises them.

La Bruyère does not stand alone. In every generation there have been men, and sometimes women, who condemned the beauty methods of the "younger generation." It was true thousands of years ago in Athens. It was true when oatmeal paste and lemon juice were applied to freckles, when dragon's blood and the fat of sheep made a pomade for the fingernails and toenails, when eyelashes were dyed and faces whitened. It is true to-day, and it will continue to be true as long as young people introduce unusual methods of beautifying themselves. The world resents anything that suggests a change in the old order of things.

At all stages of civilization people like a slight variety, but deviations from what they are accustomed to provoke a disagreeable association of ideas.

Which explains the appearance each season of old complexion washes and hair bleaches in new guise, and the ever-present protest of the reformer.

CHAPTER XVII

FUNERAL CUSTOMS

All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.

-BRYANT, "Thanatopsis."

The world will turn when we are earth,
As though we had not come nor gone;
There was no lack before our birth,
When we are gone there will be none.

-OMAR KHAYYAM.

What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death? Shall he deliver his soul from the hand of the grave? -PSALM LXXXIX, 48.

FEAR OF THE DEAD

L

IFE is a prelude to death. The one lasts but a moment; the other is an eternity.

For man there is no life-without death. Fate breathes upon a handful of dust, and a soul comes tumbling down to earth. And at the same moment a life-spent soul crumbles comfortably into dust again. The pendulum of life swings everlastingly to the tune of life-death; life— death.

While the arc of life swings with the pendulum across time, man lives, and plays, and eats, and reproduces his own kind. He divides his gift of life into little cubes called years, and each cube is a bit of lifetime cut from the whole. Then comes death and the long silence.

Where does man go? What does he do and see when he vanishes into the great unknown? Does he live again? Can he return to earth again? Or is he just-gone?

Man puzzled the problem on prehistoric plains when one of his fellows dropped dead on the march. He could

not solve it then. He cannot solve it now, though he has created religions to comfort him.

And it is because man does not understand the mystery of death that he fears it. To-day the fear of death and of the dead is tempered with faith and hope and with an understanding of life's eternal cycle. But when man was young he had neither faith nor hope nor understanding. His little world was shrouded in superstition; he regarded his very shadow with ignorant fear.

It is interesting to meditate upon man's earliest experiences with death: A cave fellow lying cold and silent. A savage who was but yesterday drunk with life, now flat and still on the ground. A cautious hand reaches out to touch the body. It is clammy. Glazy eyes stare unseeing into the sky. Those who look upon this mystery are filled with a sudden terror. An evil spirit must have claimed their comrade. Some unseen enemy must have killed him. Perhaps an enemy that still lurks in the vicinity! And so they flee from the spot in panic, leaving the body to be ravaged by the beasts.

Primitive man did not accept death as due to natural causes. He believed that death was the result of violence, either at the hands of human or animal enemies, or caused by evil and unseen demons. To the primitive mind man should continue to live until old age wore out the body or until some beast crushed out the breath. For a man or woman still young, without wound or injury, to fall silently asleep and never awaken was inconceivable, uncanny.

Consequently there existed in early times a universal dread of the "long sleep"-the death which came without tangible cause. Man refused to accept this mysterious "sleep" as the end of life. Surely he who slept so had been bewitched! He who lay so stiff and cold must be the victim of malevolent spirits!

And there grew up many word-by-mouth myths concerning this terrible demon who struck silently and without warning. There were, indeed, some fellows more imagina

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