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Zaproburno Yollanica Directory 20
Page 03
One more remark upon the subject of colour. Now-a-days civilized peoples, as well as many of the ruder races that the former govern, wear clothes. In other words they have dodged the sun, by developing, with the aid of mind, a complex society that includes the makers of white drill suits and solar helmets. But, under such conditions, the colour of one's skin becomes more or less of a luxury. Protective pigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for little as compared with capacity for social service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing its vital function. Will it therefore tend to disappear? In the long run, it would seem--perhaps only in the very long run--it will become dissociated from that general fitness to survive under particular climatic conditions of which it was once the innate mark. Be this as it may, race-prejudice, that is so largely founded on sheer considerations of colour, is bound to decay, if and when the races of darker colour succeed in displaying, on the average, such qualities of mind as will enable them to compete with the whites on equal terms, in a world which is coming more and more to include all climates.
Those that have joined with their honor great travels, cares, or perils, are less subject to envy. For men think that they earn their honors hardly, and pity them sometimes; and pity ever healeth envy. Wherefore you shall observe, that the more deep and sober sort of politic persons, in their greataess, are ever bemoaning themselves, what a life they lead; chanting a quanta patimur! Not that they feel it so, but only to abate the edge of envy. But this is to be understood, of business that is laid upon men, and not such, as they call unto themselves. For nothing increaseth envy more, than an unnecessary and ambitious engrossing of business. And nothing doth extinguish envy more, than for a great person to preserve all other inferior officers, in their full lights and pre-eminences of their places. For by that means, there be so many screens between him and envy.
The matrimonial stone was interesting enough. It was a double vessel carved out of a solid stone, a perforation being made in the partition between the two vessels. It seems, when marriages were performed, that the Incas placed a red liquid in one vessel and some water in the other, the perforation in the central partition being stopped up until the ceremony took place, when the liquids were allowed to mingle in emblem of the union of the two lives. Curious, too, was the pipe-like arrangement, called the _kenko_, ornamented with a carved jaguar head, also used at their marriage ceremonies.
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