CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN, 35 



snail or a niarsui)lan into it.s snus- retreat. Wlien tlie motlier wants to remove it she bends forward, 

 at the same time passing- Iut left hand nj) the back under her garments, and seizing the child by 

 the feet, pnlls it downward to the left; then, passing the right hand under the front of the dress, 

 she again seizes the teet 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 i>lay-impulse manifests itself among these people in various ways. They have such 

 mimetic objects as dolls, miniature boats, &c. I have seen a group of boys, sailing toy boats in a 

 pond, behave under the circumstances just as a similar grouj) has been observed to do at I'roviuce- 

 town. Cape Cod, and the same act, as performed iu 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 t<)i)s, 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 number 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 jieople that I have seen, not even the French, does ridicule so eifectually 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, TertuUian 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 snbscripsisset."* 



In addition to much that has been written by Fiench 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 theTichbourne case, 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, t 



The accompanying representations, showing extensive markings on different i)arts of the t)ody, 

 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 confined 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. Lutetiae Parisiorum, leTSf., p. 178. 



fSee Guy's HospiUil Report, XIX, 1874; also "Histoire M^dicale du Tatouage," in Archives de Mi5decine Navale, 

 Tom. 11 et 12, Paris, 1869. 



