ETHNOLOGY. 291 
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 proba- 
bility, 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, 
I 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, wo\. i. 222 ; V^\\\\2irc\s's Missio7iary Enter- 
prise, 547, 548) cut off one or two joints of their little 
fingers, and the inhabitants of Tracy Island, which was 
colonized from Samoa, do the like, according to the Rev. 
S. J. Whitwell (Petermann's Mittheibmgen for i 87 1, p. 203). 
One form of the solemnization 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. Miiller 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 Association 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 captu ferum victorem cepit, et artes 
Intulit agresti Latio." 
