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PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 
No. 7.—LIFE HISTORY OF A SAVAGE. 
By the Rey. Gro. Brown, D.D., Sydney. 
Read Monday, January 10, 1898. 
IT purpose in this paper giving a brief outline of the everyday 
life of a savage from his birth to his death. His life as compared 
with the busy exciting life of a man in these colonies in this 
present 19th century civilization may perhaps be thought of little 
importance, but no type of human life can be considered unin- 
teresting or uninstructive to the student of anthropological 
science. 
The life I am about to describe is that of a man born in a part 
of the New Britain Group, situate in about 4° 8. lat. and 153° E. 
long. His parents were members of one branch of the great 
Papuan family and had their home in the midst of a dense bush— 
not far from the beach, however, for all the coast natives live in 
dread of the bushmen. The village in which they lived was not 
laid out in streets, nor were the houses built together on one site. 
A New Britain village consists generally of a number of small 
communities or families, their houses being built together in small 
clusters and separated from those of other similar communities 
by patches of uncleared forests through which run irregular and 
very often muddy foot tracks, scooped out in some places by ease- 
loving pigs into mud-holes in which they can wallow and enjoy 
themselves during the heat of the day. These sites, however, are 
kept scrupulously clean, and it is always easy to tell an old village 
site by a circular mound in the bush caused by the accumulated 
sweepings of dead leaves and rubbish. 
The houses are all very small and very: poorly constructed. 
They are generally oblong in shape and very low. In olden days 
there was often a rattle suspended in the doorway at night against 
which anyone attempting to enter in the night would hit his head 
and so arouse the inmates. This was done as some protection 
against surprise and treachery. The furniture in the house in 
which my friend’s parents lived was neither Jarge nor varied. It 
consisted of a few bamboos along one side, raised a little from the 
ground so as to make a kind of bench or seat, a plank from some 
old canoe, which served as a kind of bed, a fishing net, some spears, 
and tomahawks, a few baskets of yams, green bananas and edible 
nuts called tamap, and a few cocoanuts. There were also a few 
water bottles and a basket or two containing lengths of native 
money called diwara, beads, pipes, tobacco, net twine, betel pepper 
gt gs lm i ea al att ain athe 
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