MUTILATIONS. 71 



tongue, hand, or arm, or from some other part.&quot; And &quot;Mr. 

 W. Foster, Agent General for oSTew South Wales, writes to 

 me that he has seen an Australian mother on meeting her 

 son after an interval of six months, gash her face with a 

 pointed stick &quot; until the blood streamed.&quot; 



364. Cuts leave scars. If the blood-offerings which 

 entail them are made by relatives to the departed spirit of 

 an ordinary person, these scars are not likely to have any 

 permanent significance ; but if they are made in propitia 

 tion of a deceased chief, not by his relatives alone but by 

 unrelated members of the tribe who stood in awe of him 

 and fear his ghost, then, like other mutilations, they 

 become signs of subjection. The Huns who &quot; at the burial 

 of Attila, cut their faces with hollow wounds,&quot; in common 

 with the Turks who did the like at royal funerals, thus 

 inflicted on themselves marks which thereafter distin 

 guished them as servants of their respective rulers. So, too, 

 did the Lacedaemonians who, &quot; when their king died, had a 

 barbarous custom of meeting in vast numbers, where men, 

 women, and slaves, all mixed together, tore the flesh from 

 their foreheads with pins and needles ... to gratify the 

 ghosts of the dead.&quot; Such customs are likely sometimes to 

 have further results. With the apotheosis of a notable 

 king whose conquests gave him the character of founder 

 of the nation, marks of this kind, borne not by his con 

 temporary followers only but imposed by them on their 

 children, may become national marks. 



That the scars caused by blood-lettings at funerals are 

 recognized as binding to the dead those who bear them, 

 and do develop in the way alleged, we have good evidence. 

 The command in Leviticus, &quot; ye shall not make any cuttings 

 in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you,&quot; 

 shows us the usage in that stage at which the scar left by 

 sacrifice of blood is still a sign partly of family subordination 

 and partly of other subordination. And Scandinavian tra- 



