Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/665

Rh this. Concerning certain ancient Central Americans, Herrera tells us that they challenged neighboring peoples when "they wanted slaves; if the other party did not accept of the challenge, they ravaged their country and cut off the noses of the slaves." And, describing a war that went on during his captivity in Ashantee, Ramseyer says the Ashantees spared one prisoner, "whose head was shaved, nose and ears cut off, and himself made to carry the king's drum."

Along with loss of nose occurs, in the last case, loss of ears, which naturally comes next to be dealt with. This is similarly interpretable as having originated from trophy-taking, and having in some cases survived; if not as a mark of ordinary slavery, still, as a mark of that other slavery which is often a punishment for crime. In ancient Mexico "he who told a lie to the particular prejudice of another had a part of his lip cut off, and sometimes his ears." Among the Honduras people a thief had his goods confiscated, "and, if the theft was very great, they cut off his ears and hands." One of the laws of an adjacent ancient people, the Miztecs, directed the "cutting off of an adulterer's ears, nose, or lips;" and by some of the Zapotecas, "women convicted of adultery had their ears and noses cut off."

But though absence of ears seems more generally to have marked a criminal than to have marked a vanquished enemy who, surviving the taking of his ears as trophies, had become a slave, we may suspect that it once did, among some peoples, mark an enslaved captive; and that, by mitigation, it gave rise to the method of marking a slave prescribed of old among the Hebrews, and which still continues in the East with a modified meaning. In Exodus xxi. 5, 6, we read that if, after his six years' service, a purchased slave does not wish to be free, his master shall "bring him to the door, or unto the door-post, and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall serve him forever." Commenting on this ceremony, Knobel says: "In the modern East, the symbol of piercing the ears is mentioned as the mark of those who are dedicated. . . . It expresses the belonging to somebody." And since, where there grows up unqualified despotism, private slavery is joined with public slavery, and the accepted theory is that all subjects are the property of the ruler, we may suspect that there hence results in some cases the universality of this mutilation. "All the Burmese," says Sangermano, "without exception have the custom of boring their ears. The day when the operation is performed is kept as a festival; for this custom holds, in their estimation, something of the rank that baptism has in ours."

As bearing indirectly upon mutilations of this class, I may add the curious fact named by Forsyth, that the Gond holds "his ears in his hands in token of submission."

Jaws can be taken as trophies only from those whose lives are taken. There are the teeth, however; some of these may be extracted