CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 35 
snail or a marsupian into its snug retreat. When the mother wants to remove it she bends forward, 
at the same time passing her left hand up the back under her garments, and seizing the child by 
the feet, pulls it downward to the left; then, passing the right hand under the front of the dress, 
she again seizes the feet and extracts it by a kind of pedalic delivery. Another common way of 
carrying children is astride the neck. The subject is one that the Chuckchii artist often carves in 
ivory. 
The play-impulse manifests itself among these people in various ways. They have such 
mimetic objects as dolls, miniature boats, &e. Ihave seen a group of boys, sailing toy boats in a 
pond, behave under the circumstances just as a similar group has been observed to do at Province- 
town, Cape Cod, and the same act, as performed in the Frog Pond of the Boston Common, may be 
called only a differentiated form of the same tendency. Their dolls, of ivory and clothed with fur, 
seem to answer the same purpose that they do in civilized communities—namely, the amusement 
of little girls—for at one place where we landed a number of Eskimo girls, stopping play on our 
approach, sat their dolls up in a row, evidently with a view to give the dolls a better look at the 
strange visitors. Spinning tops, essentially Eskimo and unique in their character, are held in the 
hand while spinning; on the Siberian Coast foot ball is played, and among other questionable 
things acquired from contact with the whalemen, a knowledge of card playing exists. We were 
very often asked for cards, and at one place where we stopped and bartered a ntnber of small 
articles with the natives they gave evidence of their aptitude at gaming. The game being started, 
with the bartered articles as stakes, one fellow soon scooped in everything, leaving the others to 
go off dead broke amid the ridicule of some of our crew, and doubtless feeling worse than dead, 
for among no people that I have seen, not even the French, does ridicule so effectually kill. 
PERSONAL ORNAMENTATION. 
Among the means taken by these people to produce personal ornamentation that of tattooing 
the face and wearing a labret is the most noticeable. The custom of tattooing having existed from 
the earliest historical epochs is important not only from an ethnological but from a medical and 
pathological point of view, and even in its relation to medical jurisprudence in cases of contested 
personal identity. 
Without going into the history of the subject, it may not be irrelevant to mention that 
tattooing was condemned by the Fathers of the Church, Tertullian among others, who gives the 
following rather singular reason for interdicting its use among women: ‘“Certi sumus Spiritum 
Sanctum magis masculis tale aliquid subscribere potuisse si feminis subscripsisset.”* 
In addition to much that has been written by French and German writers, the matter of tattoo- 
marks has of late claimed the attention of the law courts of England, the chief-justice, Cockburn, 
in the Tichbourne ease, having described this species of evidence as of *‘ vital importance,” and in 
itself final and conclusive. The absence of the tattoo-marks in this case justified the jury in their 
finding that the defendant was not and could not be Roger Tichbourne, whereupon the alleged 
claimant was proved to be an impostor, found guilty of perjury, and sentenced to penal servitude. ¢ 
The accompanying representations, showing extensive markings on different parts of the body, 
are from photographs obtained in Japan. 
Why the ancient habit of tattooing should prevail so extensively among some of the primitive 
tribes as it does, for instance, in the Polynesian Islands and some parts of Japan, and we may 
say as a survival of a superstitious practice of paganism among sailors and others, is a psycho- 
logical problem difficult to solve. Whether it be owing to perversion of the sexual instinct, which 
is not unlikely, or to other cause, it is not proposed to discuss. Be that as it may, the prevalence 
of the habit among the Eskimo is contined to the female sex, who are tatooed on arriving at the 
age of puberty. The women of Saint Lawrence Island, in addition to lines on the nose, forehead, 
and chin, have uniformly a figure of strange design on the cheeks, which is suggestive of cabalistic 
import. It could not be ascertained, however, whether such was the case. The lines drawn 
on the chin were exactly like the ones I have seen on Moorish women in Morocco. Another 
*De Virginibus velandis. Lutetiw Parisiorum, 1675f°., p. 178. 
+See Guy’s Hospital Report, XTX, 1874; also ‘‘ Histoire Médicale du Tatouage,’’ in Archives de Médecine Navale, 
Tom. 11 et 12, Paris, 1869. 
