Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 1/The yaks in France
stairs, had better put on their boots on the ground-floor.
If we consider the female dress of 1859 under any of the remaining conditions, what can we say of it? Does the costume, as a whole, follow the outline of the form? Does it fit accurately and easily? Is the weight made to hang from the shoulders? Are the garments of to-day convenient and agree- ble in use? Is the mode modest and graceful? So far from it, that all these conditions are con- spicuously violated by those who think they dress well. Here and there we may meet a sensible woman, or a girl who has no money to spend in new clothes, whose appearance is pleasing — in a straw-bonnet that covers the head, in a neat gown which hangs gracefully and easily from the natural waist, and which does not sweep up the dirt: but the spectacle is now rare; for bad taste in the higher classes spreads very rapidly down- wards, corrupting the morals as it goes.
The modern dress perverts the form very dis- agreeably. The evil still begins with the stays, in too many instances, though there is less tight- lacing than formerly. It is a pity that women do not know how little they gain by false pretences in regard to figure and complexion. Our grand- mothers would not have worn paint if they had been aware that it is useless after forty to attempt to seem younger — the texture of the skin revealing at a glance the fact which paint and dyed hair cannot conceal; except perhaps in the parks, or across a theatre. In the same way, the round waist pro- duced by tight-lacing is always distinguishable in a moment from the easy oval form of the genuine small waist. Compare the two extremes, and you will see it at once. Compare the figure of the Graces of Raflaelle, or the Venus de Medici, with the smallest and most praised waist in a factory, and observe the difference. Before the glass, the owner of the latter sees the smallness in front, and fancies it beautiful; but it is disgusting to others. It is as stiff as the stem of a tree, and spoils the form and movement more than the armour of ancient knights ever did; and we know what is going on within. The ribs are pressed out of their places, down upon the soft organs within, or overlapping one another: the heart is compressed, so that the circulation is irregular: the stomach and liver are compressed, so that they cannot act properly: and then parts which cannot be squeezed are thrust out of their places, and grave ailments are the consequence. At the very best, the complexion loses more than the figure can be supposed to gain. It is painful to see what is endured by some young women in shops and factories, as elsewhere. They cannot stoop for two minutes over their work without gasping and being blue, or red, or white in the face. They cannot go up-stairs without stopping to take breath every few steps. Their arms are half-numb, and their hands red or chilblained; and they must walk as if they were all-of-a-piece, without the benefit and grace of joints in the spine and limbs. A lady had the curiosity to feel what made a girl whom she knew so like a wooden figure, and found a complete palisade extending round the body. On her remonstrating, the girl pleaded that she had “only six-and-twenty whalebones! ”
Any visitor of a range of factories will be sure to find that girls are dropping in fainting-fits, here and there, however pure the air and proper the temperature; and here and there may be seen a vexed and disgusted proprietor, seeking the ware- house-woman, or some matron, to whom he gives a pair of large scissors, with directions to cut open the stays of some silly woman who had fainted. Occasional inquests afford a direct warning of the fatal effects which may follow the practice of tight-lacing; but slow and painful disease is much more common; and the register exhibits, not the stays, but the malady created by the stays as the cause of death. That such cases are common, any •physician who practises among the working- classes will testify.
Do the petticoats of our time serve as anything but a mask to the human form — a perversion of human proportions? A woman on a sofa looks like a child popping up from a haycock. A girl in the dance looks like the Dutch tumbler that was a favourite toy in my infancy. The fit is so the reverse of accurate as to be like a silly hoax — a masquerade without wit: while, at the same time, it is not an easy fit. The prodigious weight of the modern petticoat, and the difficulty of getting it all into the waistband, creates a necessity for compressing and loading the waist in a way most injurious to health. Under a rational method of dress the waist Bhould suffer neither weight nor pressure — nothing more than the girdle which brings the garment into form and folds. As to the convenience of the hooped skirts, only ask the women themselves, who are always in danger from fire, or wind, or water, or carriage-wheels, or rails, or pails, or nails, or, in short, everything they encounter. Ask the husbands, fathers, or brothers, and hear how they like being cut with the steel frame when they enter a gate with a lady, or being driven into a comer of the pew at church, or to the outside of the coach, for want of room. As for the children — how many have been swept off pathways, or foot-bridges, or steamboat decks by the pitiless crinoline, or hoops of some unconscious walking balloon! More children have been killed, however, by the extension of the absurd petticoat fashion to them. For many months past, it has been a rare thing to see a child under the tunic age duly clothed. The petticoats are merely for show; and the actual clothing, from the waist downwards, is nothing more than thin cotton drawers and socks, leaving a bare space between. For older boys there is a great improvement in dress — the tunic and loose trousers being preferable in every way to the stiff mannish tailed coat and tight trousers of half a century ago. But the younger children are at present scarcely clothed at all, below the arms; and the blue legs of childhood are a painful sight, whether in a beggar boy or a citizen’s son. Even in such a climate as Sierra Leone there is some- thing forlorn in thinking of the lady’s maid in a great house wearing (and possessing) nothing more in the way of clothing than a muslin gown and a blue bead- necklace (on an ebony throat, of course), but in winters like ours to see children’s legs covered with nothing better than thin cotton (thin, because the ornamentation is the vanity), is Notch Bin », 1889.] THE YAKS IN FRANCE. 391
in fact reading the sentence of death of many victims. Let it be remembered, too, that the neuralgic, rheumatic and heart diseases thus brought on are of a hereditary character. The wearer of crinoline and invisible bonnets, in in- curring such diseases herself, renders her future children liable to them; and the children now bitten by the wintry winds, if they live to be parents, may see their offspring suffer from the ignorance and vanity of their own mothers. It is universally observed that certain diseases are becoming more common every year — neuralgia and heart disease, as well as the throat ailments of which we hear so much. It would be a great benefit if we could learn how much of the form and the increase of maladies is ascribable to our modes of dress.
What is to be done? Will anything ever be done? or is feminine wilfulness and slavishness to fashion to kill off hundreds and thousands of the race, as at present? There are whole societies in America who do not see the necessity for such mischief, and who hope to put an end to it — in their own country at least. The Dress-Reform Association of the United States was instituted some years since by women who refused the in- convenience of Paris fashions in American home- steads: and they have been aided, not only by physicians, but by other men, on the ground of the right of women to wear what suits their occu- pations and their taste, without molestation. The dress which was long ago agreed upon, after care- ful consideration — the so-called Bloomer costume (not as we see it in caricature, but in its near resemblance to the most rational English fashion of recent times) — is extensively worn, not only in rural districts, but in many towns. It seems to fulfil the various conditions of rational, modest, and graceful dress better than any other as yet devised for temperate climates; and if so, it will spread, in spite of all opposition.
What opposition it met with here is not for- gotten, at home or abroad, and never will be forgotten. Some of our highest philosophers and best-bred gentlemen were more indignant and ashamed than perhaps anybody else. They said that we constantly saw Englishmen angry and scornful because of the indignities cast by Mussul- man bigotry on the dress of Europeans in Damas- cus and Jerusalem; but here were Englishmen doing the same thing, without equal excuse, when Englishwomen proposed to adapt their dress to their health, convenience, and notions of grace. The aggressors triumphed. They induced outcast women to adopt the dress, and stamped it with disrepute before it had a chance of a trial. It was an unmanly act; and if those who were concerned in it have since suffered from the extra- vagance of wife and daughters, or from sickness and death in their households which might have been averted by a sensible method of clothing old and young, they have had their retribution. Some of our newspapers are rebuking others for meddling with the women’s choice of fashions— quoting the rebuke sustained by the old “Spectator ” on account of that line of criticism: but it is an affair which concerns both sexes and all ages. What hinders a simple obedience to common-sense in the matter?
It is only for the women of those classes who really have business in life to refuse to encumber them- selves with tight, or heavy, or long, or unservice- able dress, and to adhere to any mode which suits them; and then, whatever the idle and fanciful may choose to do, the useless mortality will be mainly stopped, and the general health prevented from sinking lower. It may be confidently avowed that in this way only can women win back some of the respect which they have forfeited by the culpable absurdity of their dress within the last few seasons. From the duchess to the maid-ser- vant, the slaves of French taste have lost position; and it will require a permanent establishment of some leading points of the sense and morality of dress to restore their full dignity to the matronage and maidenhood of England.
Harriet Martineau.
THE YAKS IN FRANCE.
When the household goods of Warren Hastings were sold at Daylesford, there was found a painting from nature of a Yak, which had formerly lived in the pretty little park which surrounds the house. This greatly puzzled the squires, who thought the animal a bad beast, without points, and with nothing whatever to recommend it but its marvellous coat.
Our neighbours in France have taken a very different view of the qualities of the yak, and have been vigorously engaged, since 1854, in acclimatising this singular race of cattle in the Basses Alpes, in Dauphing, in Auvergne, and at Paris.
So little was known there about the yak in 1848, that M. Isidore Geoffroy St. -Hilaire, in his report on the domestication and naturalisation of useful animals, scarcely ventured to think of the possibility of bringing it to Europe. Very soon after he wrote, however, a female yak was sent via Calcutta, to the late Lord Derby, and she was still alive at the sale of the Knowsley collection, after his death, in 1851. There was lively bidding for the yak; she was knocked down to a dealer at a hundred guineas, and very soon resold for two; scarcely was the bargain struck when an American party — whom the astute purchaser number two had descried looming in the distance— came up, and offered three! Too late! Purchaser num- ber one had been walked round even at two hundred. No money would tempt number two, and the poor yak, in a few weeks, died in a caravan in consequence of his obstinacy.
Although the Worcestershire squires did not appreciate the qualities of the yak, it is a first-rate animal in point of usefulness, and in the elevated plateau of its native Thibet answers better than Short-horn or Long-horn, Ayrshire or Alderney.
The yak yields milk and makes a superior roast; the yak supplies good material for cloth and shawls in its woolly undercoat; the yak is a beast of burden, and drags the plough; the yak is at need a charger — Dr. Hooker was captured by a division of yak-mounted troopers on the borders of Sikkim. The yak is at once the camel, the horse, and the sheep of the Thibetan; his spoils become the insignia of honour in some countries, and the universal fly-flapper in the great houses of the Lower Himalaya, in China, and in India itself.
A wild race still exists; it is so large that there is a saying in the mountains that the liver of a wild yak is a load for the tame. Certain it is, that the skins brought home by Colonel Charlton, one of which is in the Crystal# Palace, bespeak a noble animal, not of the gigantic stature of of the Gour and Gayal, of the Arnee, or the Cape Buffalo, but a fine sporting-looking beast, with every indication of pace and power. Even the domestic animal, when free in the mountain pastures of Jura, is full of fire, his eye flashing, his head high in the air, his tail thrown forward over his back or carried aloft like a standard with the long silky hair depending; galloping with high horse-like action; and, when excited by rivalry, charging his antagonist with the velocity of an avalanche.
The native region of the yak is the northern side of the Himalaya, from Ladak, through Thibet, to northern China; on the south-side of the range he does not come lower than 10,000 feet, and has been seen as high upas 16,000, where the
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pasture is necessarily of the scantiest. His hardy nature suffices itself with the fare of a goat. The wild yak is of a beautiful dark ruddy brown, passing into black; the long silky fringe which ornaments his flank almost touching the ground, reminds one of the Musk-ox, his congener in the Arctic circle.
The yak was known to the ancients. Ælian speaks of him, calls him Poephagus: Marco Polo knew him in 1275: and then there is a long in- terval of silence until we come to Pallas and Gmelin in the last century.
And what is a yak? The woodcut explains his outward form to a certain extent. You will observe that he is a species of cattle, not an artificial breed, but a well-defined species; domesticated indeed, but derived from the existing wild animal which is still hunted on the northern slopes of the Himalaya. Poephagus grunniens, the Grunting Ox, because his voice is the voice of a hog — a peculiarity which the domestic race have preserved to perfection. He delights in many names, he is called the Sarlyk, the Svora Goy, and the Chauri Gun, as well as Yak, and the cross- bred offspring of yak and zebu is called the Dzo. Mr. Brian Hodgson, who from his long residence in Nepaul had unparalleled opportunities of collecting information about the natural history of the mountains, asserts that the yak inhabits all the loftiest plateaux of High Asia, between the Altai and the Himalaya, the Beelut Jag, and the Peling Mountains.
The form of the yak is horse-like in the contour of the withers and back, which, combined with the short and well-compacted loins, adapt him in a singular manner for the saddle. The setting on of his tail is peculiarly equine, and when in moderate action he carries it with the gay and jaunty air of an Arab courser. Great depth of chest, short muscular legs, well-knit thighs, Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/404 from the analogy of mountain mutton, we are inclined to believe them. At all events, like the Welsh sheep, the yak lives and thrives at altitudes and on pastures which will support nothing else but goats; and if the yak will live, and breed, and flourish out of the Himalaya, its acclimatisation in Europe will be a real blessing to all the mountain districts, and probably even to the moorlands, where larger breeds do nothing. In fact, the yak may become the poor man’s best friend, and the efforts which have been made in France ought to stimulate us, who possess far better means of obtaining them, to import a sufficient number to try a similar and simultaneous experiment in Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland. Lord Breadalbane has had a herd of American Bisons for years at Taymouth, and we believe has succeeded in crossing these wild children of the prairie with Ayrshire and other domestic races. In his kingly domain there is ample space and verge enough for this other bovine species from the heart of Asia, and the same good management would have the same good results. It is not likely that the clay land of the Regent’s Park would suit them for any lengthened period; but when the Zoological Society make their next importation of Indian pheasants, they ought to take measures for combining an arrangement for the importation of four or five pairs of yaks. Well exhibited in a large paddock, the yaks would make a far more attractive object than they have ever been in Paris, where, in the small inclosure they inhabit, it is impossible for them to display either the pace or action in which they luxuriate with M. de Morny in Auvergne, at Cantal, and at Barcelonette.
W. W. M.