[Illustration:  Kakhyens. (From a Photograph.)]

The only other wild tribe spoken of by Major Sladen as attending the markets on the frontier is that of the Lissus already mentioned by Lieutenant Garnier (supra, ch. xlvii. note 6), and who are said to be the most savage and indomitable of the tribes in that quarter.  Garnier also mentions the Mossos, who are alleged once to have formed an independent kingdom about Li-kiang fu.  Possibly, however, the Gold-Teeth may have become entirely absorbed in the Chinese and Shan population.

The characteristic of casing the teeth in gold should identify the tribe did it still exist.  But I can learn nothing of the continued existence of such a custom among any tribe of the Indo-Chinese continent.  The insertion of gold studs or spots, which Buerck confounds with it, is common enough among Indo-Chinese races, but that is quite a different thing.  The actual practice of the Zardandan is, however, followed by some of the people of Sumatra, as both Marsden and Raffles testify:  “The great men sometimes set their teeth in gold, by casing with a plate of that metal the under row ... it is sometimes indented to the shape of the teeth, but more usually quite plain.  They do not remove it either to eat or sleep.”  The like custom is mentioned by old travellers at Macassar, and with the substitution of silver for gold by a modern traveller as existing in Timor; but in both, probably, it was a practice of Malay tribes, as in Sumatra. (Marsden’s Sumatra, 3rd ed., p. 52; Raffles’s Java, I. 105; Bickmore’s Ind.  Archipelago.)

[In his second volume of The River of Golden Sand, Captain Gill has two chapters (viii. and ix.) with the title:  In the footsteps of Marco Polo and of Augustus Margary devoted to The Land of the Gold-Teeth and The Marches of the Kingdom of Mien.—­H.C.]

NOTE 3.—­This is precisely the account which Lieutenant Garnier gives of the people of Laos:  “The Laos people are very indolent, and when they are not rich enough to possess slaves they make over to their women the greatest part of the business of the day; and ’tis these latter who not only do all the work of the house, but who husk the rice, work in the fields, and paddle the canoes.  Hunting and fishing are almost the only occupations which pertain exclusively to the stronger sex.” (Notice sur le Voyage d’Exploration, etc., p. 34.)

NOTE 4.—­This highly eccentric practice has been ably illustrated and explained by Mr. Tylor, under the name of the Couvade, or “Hatching,” by which it is known in some of the Bearn districts of the Pyrenees, where it formerly existed, as it does still or did recently, in some Basque districts of Spain. [In a paper on La Couvade chez les Basques, published in the Republique Francaise, of 19th January, 1877, and reprinted in Etudes de Linguistique et a’ Ethnographie par A. Hovelacque et Julien Vinson, Paris, 1878, Prof.  Vinson quotes the following curious passage from the poem in ten cantos, Luciniade, by Sacombe, of Carcassonne (Paris and Nimes, 1790):