ON THE CRANIOLOGY OF THE BUSHMEN. 477 



the direction of musical performances. The same however may be 

 said of other priscan races as well as of them and the Mongolian 

 and Kalmuck tribes \ and we cannot therefore lay any weight upon 

 this point of similarity. 



The custom, however explained, which the Khoi-Khoin races have 

 of cutting off one or more joints of the little and ring fingers 

 might, but with no great amount of probability, be taken to point 

 to the existence of an affinity to races as far dislocated in space as 

 the inhabitants of certain islands in Oceania, both Papuan and 

 Malay. The Papuans, according to Sir John Lubbock (' Prehistoric 

 Times/ 1 869, p. 445), cut off the end both of the little toe and the 

 little finger as a sign of mourning. The Friendly Islanders (Cook's 

 'Voyages,' vol. i. 12% ; Williams's 'Missionary Enterprise,' 547, 548) 

 cut off one or two joints of their little fingers, and the inhabitants 

 of Tracy Island, which was colonised from Samoa, do the like ac- 

 cording to the Rev. S. J. Whitwell (Petermann's ' Mittheilungen ' 

 for 187 1, p. 203). One form of the solemnisation of matrimony 

 amongst the Australians consists in the biting off by a woman of a 

 bit of the little finger of the left hand. I do not know that the 

 fact, deposed to by F. Muller in his contribution to the ' Memoirs 

 on the Voyage of the Novara,' p. 6, to the effect that Caffre women, 

 when a child is sick, or when they themselves become widows, have 

 a piece of their little fingers cut off, need be taken as indicating 

 anything more than the exceeding contagiousness of bad and 

 foolish customs, of which the old anthropologist and zoologist 

 Zimmermann (cit. ' Address to Biological Section of British Asso- 

 ciation Meeting at Liverpool,' see Report for year 1871) spoke so 

 caustically. Several instances of such adoption and borrowing, on 

 the part of the Abantu tribes, from the conquered and persecuted 

 Khoi-Khoin, might be adduced, and might be paralleled, at some 

 distance, by the fact embodied in the two lines of Horace — 



'Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes 

 Intulit agresti Latio.' 



1 The point of similarity is not, I apprehend, in the character of the music so much 

 as in the fact that the compared peoples admire it such as it is. Of the Kalmuck 

 music Pallas writes (and, as the work is little accessible, I quote) as follows, 'Samm- 

 lungen Historischer Nachrichter uber die Mongolischen Volkerschaften,' i. p. 152 :— 

 'Die Melodie der Kalmucken, besonders ihre zartliche und verliebte Musik, hat 

 solche langgezerte klagliche Tone und solche Dissouanzen dass sie ein gutgewohntes 

 Ohr mit noch fast mehr Widerwillen als alte Franzosische Musik, anhort !' 



