496 MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE. 
The fundamental reason upon which the use of the drinking reed is 
based is that the warrior or devotee shall not let water touch his lips. 
It is strange to find among the regulations with regard to taking water 
by the warrior caste: ‘*He shall not sip water while walking, standing, 
lying down, or bending forward.” ! 
The Dharma-sttra, traditionally connected with the Rishi-Vasishtha, 
of the Seventh Mandala of the Rig-Veda, is a relic of a Vedie school of 
the highest antiquity. Its seat was in the present northwestern prov- 
inces of India, and, like the Dharmasastra of Gautama, it is the sole 
surviving record from this source. ? 
There was another service performed by reeds or tubes in the domestic 
economy of nations around the north pole. As the Apache are derived 
from an Arctic ancestry it does not seem amiss to allude to it. Lord 
Lonsdale, in describing the capture of a whale which he witnessed, says 
that the Eskimo women “first of all gathered up the harpoons and 
then pulled out all the spears. As each spear was withdrawn a blow- 
pipe was pushed into the wound and the men blew into it, after which 
the opening was tied up. When every wound had been treated in this 
manner the whale resembled a great windbag and floated high in the 
water.” 
In the National Museum at Washington, D. C., there are many pipes 
made of the bones of birds, which were used by the Inuit as drinking 
tubes when water had to be taken into the mouth from holes cut in the 
ice. These drinking tubes seem to be directly related to our subject, 
although they may also have been used as Lonsdale describes the pipes 
for blowing the dead whale full of air. Another point to be mentioned 
is that the eagle pipe kept in the mouth of the young warrior undergo- 
ing the torture of the sun dance among the Sioux and other tribes on 
the plains is apparently connected with the ‘‘bebedero del Sol” of the 
peoples to the south.* 
The use of this drinking reed, shown to have been once so intimately 
associated with human sacrifice, may have disappeared upon the intro- 
duction of labrets, which seem, in certain cases at least, to be associated 
with the memory of enemies killed in battle, which would be only 
another form of human sacrifice. This suggestion is advanced with 
some misgivings, and only as a hypothesis to assist in determining for 
what purpose labrets and drinking tubes have been employed. The 
Apache have discontinued the use of the labret, which still is to be 
found among their congeners along the Lower Yukon, but not among 
those living along the lower river.!. According to Dall the custom was 
probably adopted from the Inuit; he also shows that whenever labrets 
are worn in a tribe they are worn by both sexes, and that the women 
asstune them at the first appearance of the catamenia. 
1Vasishtha, cap. 3, pars. 26-30, pp, 20-21. Sacred Books of the East, Oxford, 1882, vol. 14, edition of 
Max Miller. 
2Thid. 
3 Diego Duran, loc. cit. 
45ee Dall, Masks and Labrets, p. 151. 
