BOURKE.] TROPHIES AND RELICS. 485 
of wood, hide, nails of dead people, claws of animals, and beaks of 
birds.” Stanley saw them displayed before King Mtesa.! 
“Some of the women in Gippsland wear round the neck human hands, 
which, Mr. Hull says, were beautifully prepared. He moreover informs 
me that they sometimes wear the parts of which the ‘ Lingam’ and 
‘Priapus’ were the emblems.”? ‘* The Gippsland people keep the relics 
of the departed. They will cut off the hands to keep as a remembrance, 
and these they will attach to the string that is tied round the neck.”? 
Smyth also relates that the women of some of the Australian tribes 
preserve “the hands of some defunct member of the tribe—that of 
some friend of the woman’s, or perhaps one belonging to a former hus- 
band. This she keeps as the only remembrance of one she once loved; 
and, though years may have passed, even now, w sn she has nothing 
else to do, she will sit and moan over this relic of humanity. Some- 
times a mother will carry about with her the remains of a beloved child, 
whose death she mourns.” * The Australians also use the skulls of their 
“nearest and dearest relatives” for drinking vessels; thus, a daughter 
would use her mother’s skull, ete.® 
“One of the most extraordinary of their laws is. that a widow, for 
every husband she marries after the first, is obliged to cut off a joint of 
a finger, which she presents to her husband on the wedding day, 
beginning at one of the little fingers.”° 
In the Army and Navy Journal, New York, June 23, 1888, is men- 
tioned a battle between the Crow of Montana and the Piegan, in which 
the former obtained some of the hands and feet of dead warriors of the 
first-named tribe and used them in their dances. 
Catlin shows that the young Sioux warriors, after going through the 
ordeal of the sun dance, placed the little finger of the left hand on the 
skull of a sacred buffalo and had it chopped off.7 
“The sacrifices [of American Indians] at the fasts at puberty some- 
times consist of finger joints.”® 
In Dodge’s Wild Indians is represented (P1. v1, 15) a Cheyenne neck- 
lace of the bones of the first joint of the human fingers, stripped of skin 
and flesh. I have never seen or heard of anything of the kind, although 
I have served with the Cheyenne a great deal and have spoken about 
their customs. My necklace is of human fingers mummified, not of 
bones. 
Fanny Kelly says of a Sioux chief: “‘“He showed me a puzzle or 
game he had made from the finger bones of some of the victims that 
1 Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1, p. 327. 
2 Miles, Demigods and Demonia, in Jour. Ethnol. Soc.. London, vol. 3, p. 28, 1854. 
3Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, p. 30. 
4Tbid., p. 131. 
5 Tbid., p. 348. 
© Peter Kolben, speaking of the Hottentots, in Knox, vol. 2, p. 394. 
7 O-kee-pa, pp. 28-29. 
® Frazer, Totemism, Edinburgh, 1887, pp. 54,55; after Maximilian. 
