THE ORIGIN OF SHAVING.

Evening Star, Issue 11682, 14 February 1902, Page 8

THE ORIGIN OF SHAVING.

Mr W. Shaw Sparrow contributes an article to the ' Magazine of Art,' on ' Hirsute Adornments and their Lore,' in which he torches on the origin of the custom of shaving. "My own theory," he says, ','» that the origin of shaving is to be found in the very primitive custom of painting the body. Now, in more barbarous time this odd vanity was everywhere more marked, and hence we may suppose that, no painted tribes liked their skin decorations to be hidden from view by a veil of hair- Hence they removed the offending things, as the Red Indians seem to bear witness and their variegated bodies became the first' public exhibition of a crudely realistic art. Again, all primitive shaving tools, like razors of obsidian, preceded any instrument wliich could trim the hair neatly, and thus our prehistoric hunter-artist, whose beard came to a point, and whoso sporting tactics are so well known in his drawing, knew not the beginiung of the barber's craft. It may have been those tactics that made it, necessary for his ancestors to sharvo both their faces and their heads; for consider how flowing beards and long hair must, have caught in every bush and bramble as the unshaven hunter crawled along the ground after his dangerous quarry. This tbcorv is quite in iine with the historic fact .-aat Alexander the Great put an end to beards in the Macedonian army only because they were pulled in battle. Last of all the first prehistoric man who pined two metal raw>rs together introduced the art of clipping the. beard to a point. Many bronsre rar.ors have been exhumed in France, and aTo at least as old as those Sicilian ones with which Scipio Africanus set the fashion of shaving in Rome; but they were modelled, probably, on other such instruments used m tiroes vastly more primitive.