Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/566

548 'How many heads did your father or grandfather get?' If less than his own number, 'Well, then, you have no occasion to be proud.' "

The head of an enemy is of inconvenient bulk; and when the journey home is long there arises a question—cannot proof that an enemy has been killed be given by carrying back a part only? In some places the savage infers that it can, and acts on the inference.

This modification and its meaning are well shown in Ashantee, where "the general in command sends to the capital the jawbones of the slain enemies;" and where, as Ramseyer further tells us, "a day of rejoicing occurred on July 3d, when nineteen loads of jaws arrived from the seat of war as trophies of victory." When first found, the Tahitians, too, carried away the jawbones of their enemies; and Cook saw fifteen of them fastened up at the end of a house. Similarly of Vate, where "the greater the chief, the greater the display of bones," we read that, if a slain enemy was "one who spoke ill of the chief, his jaws are hung up in the chiefs house as a trophy:" a tacit threat to others who vilified him. A recent account of another Papuan race inhabiting Boigu, on the coast of New Guinea, further illustrates the practice, and also its social effect. Mr. Stone writes: "By nature these people are bloody and warlike among themselves, frequently making raids to the 'Big Land,' and returning in triumph with the heads and jawbones of their slaughtered victims, the latter becoming the property of the murderer, and the former of him who decapitates the body. The jawbone is consequently held as the most valued trophy, and the more a man possesses the greater he becomes in the eyes of his fellow-men." It may be added that, by the Tupis of South America, trophies of an allied kind were worn. In honoring a victorious warrior, "among some tribes they rubbed his pulse with one of the eyes of the dead, and hung the mouth upon his arm like a bracelet."

With the display of jaws as trophies, there may be named a kindred use of teeth. America furnishes instances. The Caribs "strung together the teeth of such of their enemies as they had slain in battle, and wore them on their legs and arms." The Tupis, after devouring a captive, preserved "the teeth strung in necklaces." The Moxos women wore "a necklace made of the teeth of enemies killed by their husbands in battle." In the times of the Spanish invaders, the Central Americans made an image, "and in its mouth were inserted teeth taken from the Spaniards whom they had killed." And a passage quoted above specifies teeth as among the trophies worn by the Ashantees.

Other parts of the head, easily detached and carried, also serve. Where many enemies are slain, the collected ears yield in small bulk a means of counting; and probably Zenghis Khan had this end in view when, in Poland, he "filled nine sacks with the right ears of the