36 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tightly laced girl. The interior of the " Marea " is adorned with 

 weapons and trophies of war and the chase, and the posts are often 

 beautifully carved. No woman is ever permitted to enter it, and 

 its object is to promote chastity and prevent a too rapid increase of 

 the population by illegitimate offspring. 

 The Papuans are polygamists, and contract 

 and dissolve their marriages without com- 

 punction and with very little ceremony. In 

 this respect they are by no means as strict 



^H^e 



Papuan Designs burned on Bamboo Tobacco Pipes. 



as the Australians, who are monogamists in practice, not because a 

 plurality of wives is prohibited, but because no one is rich enough 

 to maintain a harem. 



The religious conceptions of the Papuans are crude, and their 

 sole cult is a sort of worship of ancestors, to whose images, carved 

 in wood, special reverence is paid. The strong attachment to kin, 

 which forms the basis of this worship, finds an extremely unpleasant 

 and unwholesome expression in long periods of mourning, and un- 

 willingness to part with the bodies of the dead. Near relatives sleep 

 for weeks, and even months, by the side of a decaying corpse, and 

 smear themselves with the fetid exudations of putrefaction. The 

 disconsolate widow blackens her body with coal dust, and covers her- 

 self from head to foot with a network, which she wears until it rots 

 and falls to pieces, and meanwhile conscientiously abstains from 

 washing. Finally, when the corpse is committed to the earth, it is 

 buried directly under the house, in order to remain as near as possi- 

 ble to the sorrowing survivors, so that each family lives over its own 

 private graveyard. The efforts of the Governor of British New 

 Guinea to abolish these disgusting customs, which cause the spread 

 of infectious diseases and often produce pestilence, have proved for 



