SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. 2~> 



village with few things except the bare necessities of life. The houses 

 stood upon the ground and were not more than five feet high and nine 

 feet long. Their rounded roofs were made of ti tree bark ; all the 

 houses were open in front, many were also open at their opposite end, 

 so that they were in fact mere roofed sheds. In the better built houses 

 the bark roof was continued over what must Vie regarded as the back 

 of the house to within a foot or eighteen inches of the ground. 



The Toro, for this appeared to be the tribal name for these 

 Bensbach River natives, are spare and moderately tall, with thin legs 

 and often thin bony faces, projecting zygomata and marked supraorbital 

 ridges. Facially they seem to vary more than other western tribes, 

 some of them closely resembling examples of the less intelligent 

 European types. The hair of all was frizzly and the nostrils were 

 generally bored, in some cases in two places. In many these holes 

 have become very small, so that the plugs that some men wore were 

 evidently not considered important articles of toilette. Their noses 

 are generally long and coarse with moderately broad bridges and often 

 coarse fleshy tips which are never hooked. Generally speaking the 

 Toro appear long faced. 1 In some of the older men the front teeth 

 had gone, in others the fangs were exposed by receding gums, but in 

 every case their teeth were white and no sign of betel chewing was 

 seen, nor were any lime gourds noted. One of their favourite 

 attitudes was to stand on one leg, the sole of the other applied just 

 above the knee of the leg which supports the weight of the body ; in 

 fact they assumed the attitude figured by Grogan for the Dinkas of 

 the Nile swamps. 



With the exception of nose, hair and arm ornaments, most of the 

 men went naked. A few, however, wore a pubic shell. These 

 pubic shells were said not to have been traded, but to have been 

 fetched by the Toro themselves from the coast between the Bensbach 

 and Morehead Rivers. As a rule the shells were not ground or in 

 any way worked, though in one Melo shell the curve had been so 



1 Measurements bear out the impression of variability already referred to; the 

 cephalic index of 21 men varied from 69 to 86 with an average of 74 



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