But still more remarkable is the practice of striking out one of the front teeth at the age of puberty, a custom observed both on the coast and as far as I penetrated in the interior.  On the western coast also Dampier observed that the two fore-teeth were wanting in all the men and women he saw.  According to Piper certain rites belong to this strange custom.  The young men retire from the tribe to solitary places, there to mourn and abstain from animal food for many days previous to their being subjected to this mutilation.  The tooth is not drawn but knocked out by an old man, or coradje, with a wooden chisel, struck forcibly and so as to break it.  It would be very difficult to account for a custom so general and also so absurd, otherwise than by supposing it a typical sacrifice, probably derived from early sacrificial rites.  The cutting off of the last joint of the little finger of females seems a custom of the same kind; also boring the cartilage between the nostrils in both sexes and wearing therein, when danger is apprehended, a small bone or piece of reed.*

(Footnote.  The aborigines of Australia seem to resemble more, although at so great a distance, those of the Sandwich Islands than the natives of any other of the numerous isles so much nearer to them.  According to Cook this strange custom of striking out the teeth prevails also there.  “The knocking out their fore teeth,” says that navigator, “may be, with propriety, classed among their religious customs.  Most of the common people and many of the chiefs had lost one or more of them; and this we understood was considered as a propitiatory sacrifice to the Eatooa to avert his anger; and not like the cutting off a part of the finger at the Friendly Islands to express the violence of their grief at the death of a friend.”  Cook’s Voyage.)

PAINTING WITH RED.

To paint the body red seems also a custom of the natives in all parts that I have visited:  but the most constant use of colours both white and red appears on the narrow shield or hieleman (see below) which is seldom to be found without some vestiges of both colours about the carving with which they are also ornamented.*

(Footnote.  “A German pays no attention to the ornament of his person; his shield is the object of his care; and this he decorates with the liveliest colours.”  Tacitus de Mor.  Germ. c.6.)

RAISED SCARS ON ARMS AND BREAST.

The “large punctures or ridges raised on different parts of their bodies, some in straight and others in curved lines” distinguish the Australian natives wherever they have been yet seen and, in describing these raised scars, I have quoted the words of Captain Cook as the most descriptive although having reference to the natives of Adventure Bay, in one of the most southern isles of Van Diemen’s Land, when first seen in 1777.

CUTTING THEMSELVES IN MOURNING.

It is also customary for both men and women to cut themselves in mourning for relations.  I have seen old women in particular bleeding about the temples from such self-inflicted wounds.*