332 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



He reports that in the Semangs, a primitive and nomad race, 

 gradually disappearing before Chinese and Malay civiliza- 

 tion, he has proved the existence of a non-Malayan and a 

 probably Papuan element. He is about returning to Russia 

 for the purpose of publishing the results of his travels in 

 New Guinea and other parts of the East Indies. 13 A, June 

 12,1875,607. 



CRANIAL AMULETS. 



Dr. Prunieres, in 1873, found in the dolmens of Marvejols 

 (Lozere) some skulls, pierced, and in their cavities small rings 

 of polished cranial bones. Since this discovery the attention 

 of others has been drawn to the same subject. Baron Larrey, 

 in a communication to the Academy of Medicine, describes 

 trepanning among the Kabyles. General Faidherbe found 

 two skulls in Koknia, Algiers, similarly treated. Mr. Squier 

 presented to the Societe d'Anthropologie a pierced skull from 

 an ancient Peruvian huaca. M. Chil related at the Congress 

 at Lille that he had found a perforated skull in the Canaries. 

 In the Gazette Hebd. de Medicine et de Chirurgie for 1874 is 

 an account of trepanning among the South Sea Islanders. 

 The Greeks were familiar with the operation, and the word 

 from which the name is derived, rps7rio, also describes the 

 universal method of its performance. The motives assigned 

 for this practice, which was performed upon infants and 

 youth, upon the living and the dead, are various. That a 

 blow from a stone battle-axe, or from a sling, pierced the 

 skull, and deposited the round fragment in the cavity, is dis- 

 proved by the fact that many of these wounds are healed, 

 and the wound is unaccompanied by fracture. So we are to 

 assign either a surgical or a religious reason ; and inasmuch 

 as religion and medicine go hand in hand among savage 

 tribes, a mixed motive, or a purely religious one, seems to 

 accord best with all the facts. A demon being the cause of 

 disease, when the pain is in the head the Kabyles say they 

 open the skull to let the disease out. The operation is not 

 more painful than many of the initiatory rites of savages, 

 only dangerous after violent contusion, and certainly not as 

 fatal as the disemboweling practiced among the West Coast 

 Africans. But the restriction of the operation to the young 

 and to the dead points unmistakably to initiatory and funereal 



