OBEISANCES. 129 



attitude of the conquered before the conqueror, to find the 

 clue to certain further movements signifying submission. 

 As described in a foregoing paragraph, the supplicating 

 Khond &quot; throws himself on his face with hands joined.&quot; 

 Whence this attitude of the hands? 



From the usages of the people among whom submission 

 and all marks of it were carried to great extremes, an in 

 stance has already been given indicating the genesis of 

 this action. A sign of humility in ancient Peru was to have 

 the hands bound and a rope round the neck: the condition 

 of captives was simulated. Did there need proof that it 

 has been a common practice to make prisoners of war de 

 fenceless by tying their hands, I might begin with Assyrian 

 wall-sculptures, in which men thus bound arc represented; 

 but the fact that among ourselves, men charged with crimes 

 are hand-cuffed by the police when taken, shows how 

 naturally suggested is this method of rendering prisoners 

 impotent. And for concluding that bound hands hence 

 came to be an adopted mark of subjection, further reason 

 is furnished by two strange customs found in Africa and 

 Asia respectively. When the king of Uganda returned 

 the visit of captains Speke and Grant, &quot; his brothers, a mob 

 of little ragamuffins, several in hand-cuffs, sat behind him. 

 ... It was said that the king, before coming to the throne, 

 always went about in irons, as his small brothers now do.&quot; 

 And then, among the Chinese, &quot; on the third day after the 

 birth of a child . . . the ceremony of binding its wrists is 

 observed. . . . These things are worn till the child is 

 fourteen days old . . . sometimes . . . for several months, or 

 even for a year. ... It is thought that such a tying of the 

 wrists will tend to keep the child from being troublesome in 

 after life.&quot; 



Such indications of its origin, joined with such examples 

 of derived practices, force on us the inference that raising 

 the joined hands as part of that primitive obeisance signi 

 fying absolute submission, was an offering of the hands to 



