BY E. ETHERIDGE, JUN. 255 



hot stones, presumedly to cauterise it, and then kept apart by 

 small sticks, resulting in the formation of a permanent opening 

 through which the spermatic fluid is emitted. Mr. A. J. Vogan, 

 of the ' Illustrated London News ' staff, who has just returned 

 from the Mulligan River, informs me that the blacks around 

 Sandringham Station, the locality at which Mr. Crummer's Mika 

 knife was obtained, slit up the entire length of the urethra, after 

 the manner described by Dr. Cox, and that he had personally 

 examined two such cases. 



The Mulligan River knife consists of a highly altered schist, 

 now in the condition of a jasperoid rock, and at the after end is 

 encased in a more or less rounded mass of resin, which serves as 

 a handle, the wooden termination represented in Lumholtz's 

 figure being absent here. The entire length of the weapon is 

 seven and a half inches, that of the blade four and a half. It 

 is three-edged, one face practically flat and unworked, the other 

 angular and divided by a rather excentric ridge. The smaller of 

 the two faces thus produced is again separated into two parts by 

 a somewhat oblique subsidiary ridge passing to the cutting edge. 

 There are no traces of any secondary working. The cutting edge 

 is somewhat irregular in outline, but excellently well kept in the 

 one plane, terminating forwards in a slightly jagged point, and 

 very sharp. The surface is perfectly smooth. The blade at its 

 insertion in the resin is all but two inches in width. The section 

 is widely triangular, with the apex of the triangle somewhat 

 excentric. 



The figure given by Lumholtz is the only one of the Mika-knife 

 with which I am acquainted. Like that from Sandringham. it is 

 a three-sided weapon, with two of the cutting edges very sharp. 

 Instead of a simple handle of resin, the latter is, in this case, used 

 as the medium of uniting the knife to its wooden handle, which is 

 described as painted with chalk figures, whilst the intermediate 

 resinous portion is ornamented with reddish-brown ochre. The 

 knife was encased in a sheath made of two pieces of tea-tree bark, 

 placed together, and kept in apposition by a binding string spun 



