486 MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE. 
had fallen beneath his own tomahawk. The bones had been freed from 
the flesh by boiling, and, being placed upon a string, were used for play- 
ing some kind of Indian game.”! 
Strabo recounts in his third book that the Lusitanians sacrificed 
prisoners and cut off their right hands to consecrate them to their gods. 
Dulaure says that the Germans attached the heads and the right 
hands of their human victims to sacred trees.’ 
Adoni-bezek cut off the thumbs and great toes of seventy kings of 
Syria.* 
The necklace of human fingers is not a particle more horrible than the 
ornaments of human bones to be seen in the cemetery of the Capuchins 
in Rome at the present day. I have personally known of two or three 
cases where American Indians cut their enemies limb from limb. The 
idea upon which the practice is based seems to be the analogue of the 
old English custom of sentencing a criminal to be ‘‘hanged, drawn, 
and quartered.” 
Brand gives a detailed description of the ‘‘hand of glory,” the pos- 
session of which was believed by the peasantry of Great Britain and 
France to enable a man to enter a house invisible to the occupants. It 
was made of the hand of an executed (hanged) murderer, carefully des- 
iccated and prepared with a great amount of superstitious mummery. 
With this holding a candle of “the fat of a hanged man” burglars felt 
perfectly secure while engaged in their predatory work.t The belief was 
that a candle placed in a dead man’s hand will not be seen by any but 
those by whom it is used. Such a candle introduced into a house kept 
those who were asleep from awakening. 
The superstition in regard to the “hand of glory” was widely diffused 
throughout France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain. As late as 
the year 1831 it was used by Irish burglars in the county Meath. 
Dr. Frank Baker delivered before the Anthropological Society of 
Washington, D. C., a lecture upon these superstitions as related to the 
“hand of glory,” to which the student is respectfully referred.® 
An Aztee warrior always tried to procure the middle finger of the left 
hand of a woman who had died in childbirth. This he fastened to 
his shield as a talisman.® The great weapon of the Aztec witches was 
the left arm of a woman who had died in her first childbirth.? Pliny 
mentions “ still-born infants cut up limb by limb for the most abomina- 
ble practices, not only by widwives, but by harlots even as well!”® 
1 Kelly, Narrative of Captivity, Cincinnati, 1871, p. 143. 
2 Différens Cultes, vol. 1, p. 57. 
3 Judges, I, 7. 
4 Brand, Pop. Ant., London, 1882, vol. 3, p. 278. 
5 American Anthropologist, Washington, D. C., January, 1888. 
6 Kingsborough, vol. 8, p,70. The Aztec believed that the woman who died in childbirth was equal 
to the warrior who died in battle and she went to the same heaven. The middle finger of the left 
hand is the finger used in the necklace of human fingers. 
7 Sahagun, in Kingsborough, vol. 7, p. 147. 
4 Pliny, Nat. Hist., lib. 28, cap. 20. Holland’s translation 
