294 APPENDIX. 



tribes, 1 and 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 prob- 

 ability, 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,' 1869, 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,' vol. i. p. 222; 

 Williams's 'Missionary Enterprise,' pp. 5 47, 5 4 8) 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 (Peter- 

 mann's ' Mittheilungen ' for 1871, p. 203). One form 

 of the solemnization of matrimony amongst the Aus- 

 tralians 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. Muller 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 {pit. ' Address to Biological Section of 

 British Association Meeting at Liverpool,' see Report 

 for year 1 871) spoke so caustically. Several instances 

 of such adoption and borrowing, on the part of the 



1 The point of similarity is not, I apprehend, in the character of the music 

 so much as in the fact that the compared peoples admire it such as it is. Of 

 the Kalmuck music Pallas writes (and, as the work is little accessible, I quote) 

 as follows, ' Sammlungen Historischer Nachrichter Tiber die Mongolischen 

 Volkerschaften,' Bd. i. p. 152 — " Die melodie der Kalmiicken, besonders ihre 

 zartliche und verliebte Musik, hat solche langgezerte klagliche Trine und 

 solche Dissonanzen dass sie ein gutgewohntes ohr mit noch fast mehr Wider- 

 willen als alte Franzosische Musik. anhort !" 



