554 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



If, in primitive states, men are honored according to their prowess 

 if their prowess is estimated here hy the number of heads they can 

 show, there hy the number of jawbones, and elsewhere by the number 

 of scalps if such trophies are treasured up for generations, and the 

 pride of families is proportioned to the number of them taken by an- 

 cestors if of the Gauls in the time of Posidonius we read that " the 

 heads of their enemies that were the chiefest persons of quality they 

 carefully deposit in chests, embalming them with the oil of cedars, 

 showing them to strangers, glory and boast " that they or their fore- 

 fathers had refused great sums of money for them then, obviously, 

 a kind of class-distinction is initiated by trophies. On reading that 

 in some places a man's rank varies with the quantity of bones in or 

 upon his dwelling, we cannot deny that the display of these proofs of 

 personal superiority originates a regulative influence in social inter- 

 course. 



As political control evolves, trophy-taking becomes in several 

 ways instrumental to the maintenance of authority. Beyond the awe 

 felt for the chief whose many trophies show his powers of destruction, 

 there comes the greater awe which, on growing into a king with sub- 

 ordinate chiefs and dependent tribes, he excites by accumulating the 

 trophies others take on his behalf; rising into dread when he ex- 

 hibits in numbers the relics of slain rulers. As the practice assumes 

 this developed form, the receipt of such vicariously-taken trophies 

 passes into a political ceremony. The heap of hands laid before an 

 ancient Egyptian king served to propitiate ; as now serves the mass 

 of jawbones sent by an Ashantee captain to the court. When we 

 read of Timour's soldiers that "their cruelty was enforced by the per- 

 emptory command of producing an adequate number of heads," we 

 are conclusively shown that the presentation of trophies hardens into 

 a form expressing obedience. Nor is it thus only that a political effect 

 results. There is the derived kind of governmental restraint produced 

 by fixing up the bodies or heads of felons. 



Though offering part of a slain enemy to propitiate a ghost does 

 not enter into what is commonly called religious ceremonial, yet it 

 obviously .so enters when the aim is to propitiate a god developed 

 from an ancestral ghost. We are shown the transition by such a fact 

 as that, in a battle between two tribes of Khonds, the first man who 

 "slew his opponent struck off his right arm and rushed with it to 

 the priest in the rear, who bore it off as an offering to Laha Pennoo 

 in his grave;" Laha Pennoo being their " god of arms." Joining 

 with this such other facts as that, before the Tahitian god Oro, human 

 immolations were frequent, and the preserved relics were built into 

 walls "formed entirely of human skulls," which were "principally, if 

 not entirely, the skulls of those who have been slain in battle," we 

 are shown that gods are worshiped by bringing to them, and accumu- 

 lating round their shrines, these portions of enemies killed killed, 



