Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/508

492 them slit and stretched to such au extent that the two fists might be placed in the openings. Slit ears may be of practical use. The Kaffir carries his snuff-box in his ear-hole, and Captain Cook figures a Mangaia Islander who carried a large knife in his right ear.

"The Dyaks not only pull the lobes down to the shoulders, but also insert a number of brass rings around the rim. One man wore a large ring in each ear with smaller rings attached to it from which were pendent various articles. To one ear were thus attached two boar's tusks, an alligator's tooth, part of a hornbill's beak, three small brass rings, and two little bells." Among the Bongo we find the flesh of the abdomen slit for the insertion of sticks.

Akin to these perforations are the various forms of filing, boring, and breaking of teeth. The great districts for such deformations to-day are Australia, Malaysia, and Africa. In times gone by these were prevalent in Central America and Mexico, and Hamy describes a number of varieties. In Africa a score or more tribes file their teeth. With them it serves as a tribal mark. Thus the Batoka knock out the upper front incisors and let the lower ones grow up above the jaw. The Bongo. Kredy, Asango, and others chip and file them to various forms. The most elaborate designs, however, are found among the islands of the Indian Archipelago, where teeth are chipped, filed, engraved, bored and fitted with brass-headed brads, and dyed so that white patterns appear on a black ground (Fig. 4). In these cases the decorative idea is prominent, although from the fact that Dyaks, Ryangs, and Batta differ in pattern and style the custom retains, even here, some tribal significance. Notice the two purposes of the practice (1) as tribal marks, (2) as a decoration. It should be also observed that many and curious reasons are assigned for the practice. The Batoka, for instance, say "they wish to resemble the cow, and not the zebra." Very generally these operations, like so many other mutilations, are performed as the individual approaches manhood or womanhood. In Australia it is markedly an initiatory practice, a recognition of the child becoming adult, a reception into the tribe.