Nose-Blackening as Preventive of Snow-Blindness

Abstract

I ONLY read Prof. Ray Lankester's letter the other day on the above, which appeared in NATURE of May 3 (p. 7). I have made inquiries among travellers in the snow regions of North America, and find the practice to be quite common and well known, but have, met with no one who can explain it. I may say, however, that when I visited New Zealand in 1884 there were in one of the canoes which came off to our ship several naked natives, who had disfigured their faces by blackening their noses and eyes, and running a black fillet round the face, which gave them a villainous aspect; and I, in that insolent ignorance which seems to prevail with all pious people who have dealings with “the heathen of the isles,” believed they had got themselves up in this way in order to frighten us. But it may well have been for other reasons. Certainly the sun's heat, reflected from the still waters of the sea, was quite as painful as any I ever felt in the regions of the silver snow. I subsequently found that the black used by these people, who are of a pale complexion, was the oxide of manganese, called in their tongue labán.