Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/211

Rh grief did not blind the mourner to future convenience, and the joints cut were usually from the fingers of the left hand. In the Andaman Islands, when a child dies it is buried under the house floor and the building is deserted for a time. Finally, the family returns; the bones are dug up and the mother distributes them among friends as mementoes. These bits of bone are generally worn as parts of necklaces. In Tasmania and Australia portions of the dead are prepared with some care and worn as sacred and loved objects. Thus the zygomata are broken from a child's skull, sinews of kangaroo are passed through the orbits, and the whole is worn about the mother's neck. A lower jaw may be carefully and neatly wrapped with sinew cord from one condyle to the other and supplied with a suspension cord. Long bones, entire or partial, were wrapped and worn in the same way. These objects were all highly prized, and Bonwick says, "So many skulls and limb bones were taken by the poor natives when they were exiled, that Captain Bateman tells me that, when he had forty with him in his vessel, they had quite a bushel of old bones among them." These were in Tasmania, but similar relics abound among the Andamanese. In Australia drinking-cups were made from the skulls of the nearest and dearest relatives and carried everywhere. The lower jaw was removed, the brain extracted, and the skull cleaned; a rope handle of bulrush fibers was added, and a plug of grass was put in the vertebral aperture. All these may be considered as examples of mourning dress. There has also been a great variety of dress for the corpse itself. To describe such dress in any detail would be too much. Black is often used for shrouds. In the Tales of Hawaii, as narrated by King Kalakaua, frequent reference is made to the wrapping of the dead in the black kapa. In the Society Islands the dead chief is laid out in a special dress of shell.

In connection with relics of dead friends used as a part of costume, it may be pertinent here to refer to curious preserved heads found among various tribes. They may be simply the heads themselves, as trophies of war or reminders of friends, or they may