fuer Ethnologie, 1905, Heft 6), last for seven months, and constitute an admirable discipline.  The boys are taken away by the elders of the tribe, subjected to many trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort, sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement, brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals are arranged.

Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation ceremonies involve circumcision and urethral subincision, as well as hard manual labor and hardships.  The initiation of girls into womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the vagina.  These ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Ch.  XI).  Among various peoples in British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months, and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the nymphae.  A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement.  When the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is marriageable (C.  Marsh Beadnell, “Circumcision and Clitoridectomy as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa,” British Medical Journal, April 29, 1905).

Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a missionary, is in three stages:  (1) A stage of instruction and discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2) In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, “does not bear description;” the initiated are now complete adults, with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E. Gottschling, “The Bawenda,” Journal Anthropological Institution, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372.  Cf., an interesting account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary, Wessmann, The Bawenda, pp. 60 et seq.).

The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The Chensamwali’ or Initiation Ceremony of Girls,” Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1898, Heft 6).  At the first sign of menstruation the girl is taken by her mother out of the village to a grass hut prepared for her where only the women are allowed to visit her.  At the end of menstruation she is taken to a secluded spot and the women dance round her, no men being present.  It was only with much difficulty that Angus was enabled to witness the ceremony.