Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/46

36 tightly laced girl. The interior of the "Marea" is adorned with weapons and trophies of war and the chase, and the posts are often beautifully carved. No woman is ever permitted to enter it, and its object is to promote chastity and prevent a too rapid increase of the population by illegitimate offspring. The Papuans are polygamists, and contract and dissolve their marriages without compunction and with very little ceremony. In this respect they are by no means as strict



as the Australians, who are monogamists in practice, not because a plurality of wives is prohibited, but because no one is rich enough to maintain a harem.

The religious conceptions of the Papuans are crude, and their sole cult is a sort of worship of ancestors, to whose images, carved in wood, special reverence is paid. The strong attachment to kin, which forms the basis of this worship, finds an extremely unpleasant and unwholesome expression in long periods of mourning, and unwillingness to part with the bodies of the dead. Near relatives sleep for weeks, and even months, by the side of a decaying corpse, and smear themselves with the fetid exudations of putrefaction. The disconsolate widow blackens her body with coal dust, and covers herself from head to foot with a network, which she wears until it rots and falls to pieces, and meanwhile conscientiously abstains from washing. Finally, when the corpse is committed to the earth, it is buried directly under the house, in order to remain as near as possible to the sorrowing survivors, so that each family lives over its own private graveyard. The efforts of the Governor of British New Guinea to abolish these disgusting customs, which cause the spread of infectious diseases and often produce pestilence, have proved for