Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix, (191 5), No. 10. 93 



In his memoir Flower described two interesting mum- 

 mies, then in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons 

 in London, one "brought in 1872 from Darnley Island in 

 Torres Strait by Mr. Charles Lemaistre, Captain of the 

 French barque ' Victorine,' and the other, an Australian 

 mummy, obtained in 1845 near Adelaide, by Sir George 

 Grey." By a curious and utterly incomprehensible act 

 of vandalism these extremely rare and priceless ethno- 

 logical specimens were deliberately destroyed by Sir 

 William Flower, who naively explains his extraordinary 

 action by the statement "as the skeleton will form a 

 more instructive specimen when the dried and decaying 

 integuments are removed I have had it cleaned " (p. 393) ! 

 He treated in the same manner the second mummy, the 

 only example of its kind, so far as I am aware, in this 

 country ! His photographs show that these two speci- 

 mens, so far from being " decaying," were in a remarkably 

 good state of preservation at the time he doomed them 

 to destruction. 



Captain Lemaistre found the Torres Strait mummy 

 " in its grave, which consisted of a high straw and bamboo 

 hut of round form: it was not lying down, but standing 

 up on the stretcher" (19, p. 389). This is a close parallel 

 to the African customs — mummification, burial in a house 

 of round form, and fixing the corpse to a rough form of 

 funeral bier, which is stood up in the house. 



The skin was painted red, the scalp black. " The 

 sockets of the eyes were filled with a dark brown sub- 

 stance, apparently a vegetable gum In this was 



imbedded a narrow oval piece of mother of pearl, pointed 

 at each end, in the centre of the anterior surface of which 

 is fixed a round mass of the same resinous substance, 

 representing the pupil of the eye" (p. 301). 

 " Both nostrils bad been distended." 



