54 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



'How many heads did your father or grandfather get?' If less than 

 his own number, ' Well, then, you have no occasion to be proud.' " 



The head of an enemy is of inconvenient bulk ; and when the 

 journey home is long there arises a question cannot proof that an 

 enemy has been killed be given by carrying back a part only? 

 In some places the savage infers that it can, and acts on the infer- 

 ence. 



This modification and its meaning are well shown in Ashantee, 

 where "the general in command sends to the capital the jawbones 

 of the slain enemies;" and where, as Ramseyer further tells us, "a 

 day of rejoicing occurred on July 3d, when nineteen loads of jaws 

 arrived from the seat of war as trophies of victory." When first 

 found, the Tahitians, too, carried away the jawbones of their enemies; 

 and Cook saw fifteen of them fastened up at the end of a house. 

 Similarly of Vate, where "the greater the chief, the greater the dis- 

 play of bones," we read that, if a slain enemy was " one who spoke ill 

 of the chief, his jaws are hung up in the chiefs house as a trophy : " a 

 tacit threat to others who vilified him. A recent account of another 

 Papuan race inhabiting Boigu, on the coast of New Guinea, further 

 illustrates the practice, and also its social effect. Mr. Stone writes: 

 " By nature these people are bloody and warlike among themselves, 

 frequently making raids to the ' Big Land,' and returning in triumph 

 with the heads and jawbones of their slaughtered victims, the latter 

 becoming the property of the murderer, and the former of him who 

 decapitates the body. The jawbone is consequently held as the most 

 valued trophy, and the more a man possesses the greater he becomes 

 in the eyes of his fellow-men." It may be added that, by the Tupis 

 of South America, trophies of an allied kind were worn. In honoring 

 a victorious warrior, "among some tribes they rubbed his pulse with 

 one of the eyes of the dead, and hung the mouth upon his arm like a 

 bracelet." 



With the display of jaws as trophies, there may be named a 

 kindred use of teeth. America furnishes instances. The Caribs 

 " strung together the teeth of such of their enemies as they had slain 

 in battle, and wore them on their legs and arms." The Tupis, after 

 devouring a captive, preserved " the teeth strung in necklaces." The 

 Moxos Avomen wore " a necklace made of the teeth of enemies killed 

 by their husbands in battle." In the times of the Spanish invaders, 

 the Central Americans made an image, " and in its mouth were in- 

 serted teeth taken from the Spaniards whom they had killed." And 

 a passage quoted above specifies teeth as among the trophies worn by 

 the Ashantees. 



Other parts of the head, easily detached and carried, also serve. 

 Where many enemies are slain, the collected ears yield in small bulk 

 a means of counting ; and probably Zenghis Khan had this end in view 

 when, in Poland, he " filled nine sacks with the right ears of the 



