IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS OP THE STONE AGE. 145 



fifty small rods, a few inches long, and made of 

 wood, ivory, or the leg-bones of birds. They are 

 marked with rings or notches, differing in number on 

 each piece, and giving them different values in the 

 games played with them. They appear to be dealt like 

 cards, and each player throws down in turn the pieces 

 he may have, which are rated according to their marks. 

 If such games were in use among the old cave-men of 

 Europe, this would account for the frequency of the 

 tallies, or gambling sticks, in their former habitations. 

 The strange and ghastly custom of preserving 

 portions of the bodies of slaughtered enemies as 

 trophies of victory, belongs to the American in com- 

 mon with some of the races of the Old World. In 

 scalping the slain he agrees with the ancient Scythians 

 as described by Herodotus, and with the modern 

 aborigines of Formosa, according to the reports of 

 missionaries to that country. Our own heathen fore- 

 fathers made drinking bowls of the skulls of the dead, 

 and two specimens illustrative of this have been dis- 

 interred in Hochelaga. They are human parietal 

 bones, trimmed around the edges so as to form flat 

 bowls, and one of them has a hole at the edge, 

 probably for a string to suspend it. That customs of 

 this nature were prevalent in antiquity we have evi- 

 dence even in the monuments of civilized nations ; but 

 as yet, I believe, no traces of them have been found 

 among human pre-historic remains. Perhaps such prac- 

 tices were as yet unknown to pre-historic men, and be- 

 longed to the moral degradation of historic times alone. 



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