into further details we may state that everything referring to the propagation of the species is carefully regulated, with the object of compelling men to take wives from alien hordes. The most important Australian feast is the celebration of the attainment of puberty by the young men, who on this occasion are subjected to severe ordeals and cruel tortures, such as circumcision, ghastly tattooing, or the extraction of one or two front teeth.

It has been asserted that the Australians represent a degenerate race, and that their remote ancestors had attained a far higher degree of civilization. Some paintings, which adorn the walls of caves on Glenelg River, in northwestern Australia, have been adduced in support of this hypothesis. It is evident, however, from the cast of the features, the cranial formation, the long garments, hats, and shoes of the figures in these sketches that they were made by shipwrecked Europeans, or perhaps Phoenicians. Everything in the life, language, traditions, habits, and general character of the Australians indicates a primitive people who, instead of deteriorating, have made some slight advancement in culture. The fact that they show no marks of near kinship with their neighboring islanders, the Papuans, Malays, or Maoris, tends to complicate the question of their origin. They possess many anthropological characteristics in common with the Dravidian hill tribes of the Deccan and the pre-Dravidian Veddas of Ceylon, such as the shape of the skull, the outlines of the face, and the waviness (in distinction from woolliness) of the hair; and these physical resemblances acquire additional significance through striking similarities in the Dravidian and Australian languages. If it be true as has been maintained, and seems highly probable, that the Caucasian race is of Dravidian origin, the Australians might claim to be very remote kinsmen of the Europeans, and their likeness to degenerate types of the latter is certainly quite strong.

As already indicated, the Papuans of New Guinea belong to the later or neolithic period of the stone age, and their superior culture is especially manifest in their artistic skill and taste. Their implements are made of wood, stone, shells, bones, and similar materials, and they have never learned the use of any metal. The hatchets, of feldspar, hornblende, and other stones, are not rudely chipped, but beautifully polished, and they manufacture vessels of burned clay in which to cook their food. Everything they fabricate is remarkable for elegance of form and delicacy of ornamentation. One can not but wonder at the perfection of workmanship wrought by stone tools-knives and daggers exquisitely carved out of wood or the bones of the cassowary, bracelets, frontlets, and necklaces of

VOL. LII.-3

shells, mother-of-pearl, dogs' teeth, and straw braids finely woven. A peculiar and apparently much-prized decoration for the wrist is the lower jaw of a foe, slain in battle, with tassels or other pendent ornaments. Mussel and cockle shells serve as currency, an advance from bimetallism to bivalvism that ought to be welcome to every advocate of cheap money. The most graceful and symmetrical designs are scratched on bamboo tobacco pipes, gourds, and cocoanuts, and burned in; and all these forms and figures reveal a refinement and a fertility of imagination and a facility of mechanical execution that excite admiration and astonishment. The most charming variety of arrangement is given to the simplest pattern wrought on curved surfaces in the purest style of arabesque. Like the neolithic men of Europe, they use bows and arrows, as well as clubs and spears, which are exceedingly graceful in shape; and compared with their strong and slender oars, ours are heavy and clumsy. The same is true of their sails of matting. They also bore holes in the heads of their stone hatchets for fastening the handles. Unlike the Australians, they have a fine sense of color, which they gratify by painting their shields white, red, and black, adorning their heads with the brilliant feathers of the bird-of-paradise, the parrot, and the cassowary; by variegated stripes in the women's short skirts, woven out of grasses, reeds, and the fibers of the cocoanut, and the "lines of beauty" with which they tattoo their dark-brown skin.

The constitution of the Papuan tribe, like that of the Australian horde, is radically democratic, but differs from it in being much less communistic. Private property, in distinction from tribal possession, begins with the tillage of the soil, and this general principle applies to the fields, houses, and tools of the Papuans; but the greed of gain has not yet been developed; each family cultivates land enough for its own subsistence, in addition to the products of the chase, and there is no distinction of rich and poor. The position of a chieftain confers upon him little authority, and whatever influence he exerts is due solely to his strong personal qualities, as is the case at present with the famous Koapena, of Aroma, a man equally distinguished for his valor in war and his discernment and impartiality in the administration of justice.

The houses are built on piles, like the lake dwellings of the primitive Swiss, and sometimes stand so far out in the sea that they are surrounded by water even at ebb tide. This construction of the villages is designed to protect the inhabitants less against the attacks of wild beasts than against the assaults of the fierce mountain tribes of the interior. A curious institution is the "Marea," or bachelors' clubhouse, as Semon calls it, in which boys, on attaining the age of puberty, take up their abode, and strangers are entertained. The

inmates are under the supervision of an elderly man, and their admission to this home of youthful celibates is attended with consider

able ceremony, when they are invested with a narrow girdle belt ("ihavuri "), which makes their waists look as slender as that of a

PAPUAN LAKE DWELLINGS, WITH A LAKATOI UNDER SAIL IN THE BACKGROUND.

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