bamboo, but the wealthier of ivory or tin.  The tin pelele is often made in the form of a small dish.  The ivory one is not unlike a napkin-ring.  No woman ever appears in public without the pelele, except in times of mourning for the dead.  It is frightfully ugly to see the upper lip projecting two inches beyond the tip of the nose.  When an old wearer of a hollow bamboo ring smiles, by the action of the muscles of the cheeks, the ring and lip outside it are dragged back and thrown above the eyebrows.  The nose is seen through the middle of the ring, amid the exposed teeth show how carefully they have been chipped to look like those of a cat or crocodile.  The pelele of an old lady, Chikanda Kadze, a chieftainess, about twenty miles north of Morambala, hung down below her chin, with, of course, a piece of the upper lip around its border.  The labial letters cannot be properly pronounced, but the under lip has to do its best for them, against the upper teeth and gum.  Tell them it makes them ugly; they had better throw it away; they reply, “Kodi!  Really! it is the fashion.”  How this hideous fashion originated is an enigma.  Can thick lips ever have been thought beautiful, and this mode of artificial enlargement resorted to in consequence?  The constant twiddling of the pelele with the tongue by the younger women suggested the irreverent idea that it might have been invented to give safe employment to that little member.  “Why do the women wear these things?” we inquired of the old chief, Chinsunse.  Evidently surprised at such a stupid question, he replied, “For beauty, to be sure!  Men have beards and whiskers; women have none; and what kind of creature would a woman be without whiskers, and without the pelele?  She would have a mouth like a man, and no beard; ha! ha! ha!” Afterwards on the Rovuma, we found men wearing the pelele, as well as women.  An idea suggested itself on seeing the effects of the slight but constant pressure exerted on the upper gum and front teeth, of which our medical brethren will judge the value.  In many cases the upper front teeth, instead of the natural curve outwards, which the row presents, had been pressed so as to appear as if the line of alveoli in which they were planted had an inward curve.  As this was produced by the slight pressure of the pelele backwards, persons with too prominent teeth might by slight, but long-continued pressure, by some appliance only as elastic as the lip, have the upper gum and teeth depressed, especially in youth, more easily than is usually imagined.  The pressure should be applied to the upper gum more than to the teeth.