HANDS BUT NOT CLAWS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3743, 14 July 1883, Page 4

HANDS BUT NOT CLAWS.

(Nineteenth Century.) Tho hand of the finest lady should bo able to clasp with tho full fervour of friendship and pull a child out of danger ; and a hand upon which no dependence could be plaoed in an emergency is by no means a credit to man or woman. The notion that any lady's hand should be of this kind is, in tho real senso of tho word, vulgar. Delicacy is delightful, but weakness must either excite pity or contempt, according as it is Belf-imposed or not. The Chinese mandarin allows his nails to grow till they re-Remble claws, priding himself upon this evidence that ho never did, aud is incapable of doiug, any manly work; and many ladies cultivate their hands to suggest the same notion. It must bo roinered that the longor and moro pointed the nails the more thoy are suggestive of claws. This i» increased by tho polishing of them. Surely it cannot bo in good taste to recall our animal origin at the expense of human capabilities. Tho Greeks who accoutuatod all peculiarly and distinctly human characteristics, carefully avoided pointing tho nails, thongn no Darwin had shown them whence the nails came; they also rejected smallness of hand, such as the ideal of modern tasto demands. Proportions and fitness were to them ruling principles, outside of which thoy found no beauty. Hands are no moro beautiful for being small than eyes are for being big; but man}- a modern girl would ask her fairy godmother, if she had one, to give her eyes as big as saucers and hands as small as those of a doll, believing that the first cannot be too largo nor the last too small. Tiny foot and hands are torms constantly used by poets and novelists in a most misleading manner. It cannot be possiblo that they are intended by the writers to express anything but general delicacy and rofiuemeut; but a notion is encouraged .that results in the destruction of one of the most beautiful of natural objects—the human foot. This unfortunate notion that the beauty of tho foot depends upon its smallness leads to the crippling of it until it becomes in many cases a bunch of crippled deformity. It is a most reprehensible practico, alike revolting to good taste and good sense, to put the foot of the growing girl into a shoe that is not only too short, crumpling the toes into a bunch, but being pointed, turns the great toe inward, producing- deformity of general shape and, in tho course of time, inevitable bunions, the only wonder being that steadiness in standing or any graco of movement at all is left. i