344 "widow's cap" of the Australian aborigines, 



extant, for Mr. Bulmer states* that " they gathered kopice 

 gypsum, which was very plentiful in the district; this they burnt 

 in the tire, it was then made in a paste"; and at Lake Bonney, on 

 the Murray, Hawdon remarks, f " we procured also a great number 

 of singular sea shells and fossils embedded in the bank [of the 

 river]. The natives who were with us told me they burned these 

 shells in the fire and then made them into a plaster," with which 

 they not only decorated themselves, but also made caps. Curr, 

 on the testimony of Messrs. J. O. Macarthur and J S. Little, 

 says that the Moorloobulloo Tribe, at the junction of King's 

 Creek with the Georgina River, plastered the head with wet 

 gypsum, " which singularly enough is called Kopi, the name in 

 use in the Marowera Tribe, which dwells at the junction of the 

 Darling and Murray, 750 miles to the south-west, for those solid 

 coverings of the head."! The word Kopi is also used in the 

 Boulia District of West-Central Queensland, according to Roth,§ 

 for a "sort of gypsum, which is first of all burnt, and subsequently 

 immersed in a comparatively small quantity of water, so as to 

 make a viscid mass which dries hard like plaster of Paris." 



The use of white as a sign of mourning amongst ancient and 

 aboriginal races might be enlarged on until it became unneces- 

 sarily wearisome, but one reference is worthy of note. Among 

 the Andamanese,|| the relatives on the death of an adult smeared 

 themselves with a wash of an olive-coloured clay called Og- 

 After shaving their heads the men placed a lump of this clay, 

 termed del. a-, on their foreheads, the women on the top of the head, 

 " where it hardens and is left, much to the individual discomfort, 

 until the expiration of the days of mourning;" should it fall off in 

 the meantime, it is renewed. 



Jourii. R. Geogr. Soc. Austr. (Vict. Br.), 1888, v. Pt. 1, p. '22. 

 t Ihid. (N.S. Wales Br.), 1891, v. No. 2, p. 56. 

 X Australian Race, 1886, ii. p. 366. 

 § Ethnological Studies, 1897, p. 110. 

 II E. H, Man, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 1883, xii. pp. 141, 143, 



