the women and girls. At the first glance one is deceived into supposing that the young men wear very delicate mustaches and train them carefully! As there are no written records of any kind among the Ainu, no means of communication except oral, it is impossible to get at anything like a satisfactory explanation of this curious and thoroughly disfiguring custom. The people themselves say that they adopted it from the people whom they found in possession of the land (Yezo) when they came to the island from the West (?). Those people, the Koropok-guru, they say were smaller than themselves, and were very soon and easily subjugated; but, evincing a kindly disposition, and a desire to affiliate with the new-comers, rather than to continue to wage war upon them, they (the Ainu) met their overtures half-way, ceased to fight them, and adopted some of their customs, one of them being this curious tattooing. The process commences when a girl is about ten years of age. A woman makes a number of small cuts with a sharp knife on the lips and around the mouth, deep enough to cause the blood to flow freely. With some of the blood, and soot obtained by catching on the bottom of an iron pot, or anything else which may come handy, the smoke from burning birch-bark, a paste is made and well rubbed into the incisions. After the resulting inflammation has subsided, a number of blue marks are seen, and the process is continued until the girl becomes a woman, when the mouth presents the appearance of being surrounded by a growth of hair trained into the dainty mustaches of a most consummate dandy. The tattooing around the mouth covers about one half of the lips, so that when the mouth is closed they appear of rather a sickly color. In the mean time the tattoo-marks have been applied to the forehead, and a heavy line drawn just over the bridge of the nose to connect the eyebrows (which are not shaved off, as was the universal custom among the married women of Japan),* and on the back of the hands and up the forearm to the elbow in a rude geometrical pattern. Although the Ainu now use Japanese cotton and hemp as materials for clothing whenever they can get them, they still are compelled, at times, to resort to the material called attush. This is "the inner bark of a kind of elm, possibly Ulmus montana of Franchet and Savatier's catalogue of Japanese plants, generally known in Yezo as Ohiyo, but the true Ainu name of which is At-ni, attush meaning 'elm-fiber."" It is thoroughly hackled, then spun (or drawn out into strands), and afterward * This custom is rapidly disappearing from the neighborhood of the treaty ports, and to some extent in the interior, as is also the still more disfiguring sign of a married woman, viz., the blackened teeth. With them are going the short queue and partly shaved head of the men. woven with a small hand-loom, which is held by the toes and a cord passing around the body. This loom is a very rough affair, but in all essential parts is similar to the hand-loom still to be seen in parts of the United States. The cloth is very rough and hard, but extremely durable. The piece is narrow, but just suited to the one pattern of outer garment worn by men and women alike: this is something like the Japanese kimono, but higher in the neck, and has more shapely sleeves. It is a long, perfectly straight gown, reaches nearly to the feet, folds across the body, and is secured at the waist by a girdle similar to the Japanese obi, but much narrower and nothing like so elaborate. The Ainu are very fond of ornamenting this gown with broad, stripes of blue cotton cloth (an inch or two wide), stitched on in geometrical figures with thread, which makes a contrast: these figures are usually put on the front corners, around the neck, on the yoke, and on the sleeves. A burial-robe, which I saw in the Ainu collection of the Satporo Museum, was made of the attush, tan-colored, and ornamented with stripes of Turkey-red (an inch and a quarter wide), stitched with black, and with dark-blue cotton cloth stitched with thread of a lighter shade. The design was straight or at right angles, only one or two slightly curved lines appearing in a most intricate pattern. The durability of the Ainu coat, with a certain attractiveness about the trimming, makes it quite popular with the Japanese, and as soon as one lands on the island of Yezo the Ainu styles are seen. The sleeves of this coat are much more sensible than those of the Japanese, which are long and constantly flapping about the legs, whereas the Ainu fits rather snugly about the wrist. Like the Japanese, the Ainu married women wear an under-garment, or smock, of cotton cloth; usually this is merely a straight piece of cloth folded around the waist and loins. In winter the Ainu wear skin-clothing, and leggings and boots made of deerskin; the coast Ainu make boots of salmon-skin. Girdles or obi-are made of attush or elm-fiber. A woman's obi, which I have, is made of hemp. It is eight feet long and only two inches wide, coarsely woven of large thread, with narrow, dark-blue stripes on the edges and half-way between the edges and middle, and one broader stripe in the center with a light-blue median line. Near each end is a little bit of red as an added ornament. The Karafuto (Saghalien) Ainu women wear girdles made of leather, and ornamented with rings and Chinese cash, which they probably get from Mantchooria. The Ainu do not protect their heads and feet at all, except during the winter. One of the most common things seen in an Ainu village is the tara, or strap used for carrying all manner of bundles, and even children. It is made from attush, the same material as was formerly used altogether for their clothing. One in my possession is eight feet long. The bark has been roughly hackled, and in the center of the strap is braided into four strands, the outer ones three quarters of an inch wide, being about twice the width of the inner ones. Just at the middle for five inches these are caught together by a cross-weaving of blue and white cotton. yarn, in a regular lozenge pattern; this is the part which is placed over the forehead when carrying a load. About seven and a half inches from this, toward each end, the four strands are brought together into a round, double strand, by a seizing which crosses itself regularly. This seizing extends for nearly four inches, and then the braiding is continued in a single flat plait for about eighteen inches, when it runs out into frayed ends. In using, the bundle is slung upon the back, the broad part of the tara being brought over the forehead, so that, while the back bears the weight, the forehead keeps the bundle in place. UP DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. II. to the point at which we have arrived, a churchman, in accepting Darwinisn, finds no real difficulty. It neither gives nor suggests an alternative for God's primary creation of the world. And though in the "origin of species" it does not offer an alternative for "special creation," a Christian is only called upon to abandon a theory recently admitted into theology for one which is not only soluble in the Christian view of creation, but on grounds both scientific and theological is more in keeping with what we know of God in his present working. Those who have followed the argument of a previous paper will admit Prof. Huxley's statement, that, so far as the "origin of species" is concerned Evolution does not even come into contact with theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide, and with which it is absolutely inconsistent, is the conception of creation which theological [Quaere scientific?] speculators have based upon the history narrated in the opening of the book of Genesis. We are prepared even to go further, and to say not only that theism does not lose, but that it actually gains by the exchange. If Darwinism has destroyed the "dogma of special creation," it has destroyed a "dogma" which was a scientific, or rather unscientific, theory, and from which Christianity, like science, should be glad i e itself free. 3. But the doctrine of natural selection is said to have destroyed the argument from design in Nature. This is a much more serious matter. For a Christian is bound to believe that Nature is the work of an all-wise and beneficent Creator, whom he also believes to be almighty, so that the Christian can not accept the view adopted by Mr. J. S. Mill, and make a division of labor or of territory between God and a power which limits and thwarts him. We propose to state the difficulty here as clearly and as strongly as we can, because we believe that it is the difficulty which presses most heavily upon thinking men at the present time. In the case of Mr. Darwin himself we notice that, while the substitution of derivation for special creation seems even to have strengthened his belief in the grandeur of creation, the substitution of natural selection for Paley's teleology cut away the main argument for believing in a God at all. We are not surprised, then, to find those who are at least in imperfect sympathy with Christianity rejoicing in the discomfiture of the theologians. Mr. G. H. Lewes's pæan of triumph, in the "Fortnightly" of 1868, is perhaps the locus classicus for this view. Prof. Huxley, with ill-concealed exultation, tells us that what struck him most forcibly on his first perusal of the "Origin of Species" was "the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death-blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."* Haeckel, in the same strain, says, "Wir erblicken darin den definitiven Tod aller teleologischen und vitalistischen Beurtheilung der Organismen"; and in his "History of Creation," "I maintain, with regard to the much-talked-of 'purpose in Nature,’ that it really has no existence, but for those persons who observe phenomena in animals and plants in the most superficial manner." From the insolent dogmatism of Haeckel, and the anti-theological animus of Lewes and Huxley, it is refreshing to turn to the cautious and reverent utterances of Charles Darwin. In his letters we are able to trace every stage through which he passed on this question. At Cambridge, circa 1830, he read carefully and with "much delight" Paley's "Evidences" and his "Natural Theology," and speaks of the reading of these books as the only part of the academical course which was of the least use in the education of his mind, but he "did not trouble about " Paley's premises-i. e., he took the existence of God as a personal being for granted. Later on, apparently between 1836 and 1839, though he still "did not think much about the existence of a personal God," he abandoned Paley's view, and never returned to it: +"Generelle Morphologie," i, p. 160. # "Life and Letters," i, p. 41. "Lay Sermons." Vol. i, p. 19, English translation. The old argument from design in Nature as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.* An incidental allusion, in a letter of 1857,† shows that he had come to look upon a belief in design and a belief in natural selection as alternatives, and mutually exclusive. But here Darwin began to realize the contradiction in which he was involved. On the one side his theory was opposed to Paley's, on the other it was saturated with teleology. "The endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with, the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backward and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity," the fact that "the mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed "-these had to be set off against "the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering," and the a priori unlikelihood that an omniscient Being should have willed the world as we know it. In 1860, the year after the publication of the "Origin of Species," Darwin had reached the stage of utter bewilderment: I grieve to say [he writes to Asa Gray] that I can not honestly go as far as you do about design. I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I can not think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I can not look at each separate thing as the result of design.◊ And in an earlier letter of the same year he says: I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I can not see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I can not persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonida with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I can not anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me.t Elsewhere he says of this suggestion, "I am aware it is not logical with reference to an omniscient Deity." ↑ |