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Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
one week or more is allowed to pass, then they cut the left. Cutting in 
the young is done by means of a mussel shell. In the grown up, amputation 
is performed by means of a spider s web ligature. This is put round the 
finger and tightened at intervals so as to eat into the joint, which it does 
in the course of five or six days. After a time the piece of the finger drops 
off. If it does not drop off, the finger sometimes remains bent. 
I had been informed by whites that the finger was bent strongly and 
the ligature applied to it in that position, and that ulceration began in the 
skin over the projecting part ; but I could obtain no confirmation of this 
from the blacks. I have also heard it stated that the mutilation is inflicted 
only at marriage. Of this I found no confirmation from the aboriginals 
whom I questioned. 
At Brock’s Creek I saw a black youth who had lost the terminal phalanx 
of his right forefinger, and who had a deep constriction on the middle 
phalanx. On inquiry I found that this was due to the lad having put on 
an iron ring so tightly that he could not get it off, and the result was as 
stated. 
The Foot of the Aboriginal. 
In 1893 I had occasion to make a series of investigations into the 
structure and functions of the lower extremity of the human subject. The 
results I embodied in a thesis which was not published at that time. Some 
statements in it were suggested by certain strictures made by Mr Ellis of 
Gloucester upon artistic work, or, as he would probably have preferred to 
term it, artists’ work. 
In dealing with the action of the toes I remarked that the use of the 
great toe is taken advantage of in many actions, involving special muscular 
effort or special dexterity in maintaining equilibrium, or in certain actions 
of the foot that have a resemblance to grasping. This is often illustrated 
in art, as in Leighton’s “ Athlete struggling with a Python,” and Myron’s 
“ Discobolus.” The same thing is noticed in literature : “ He sat with his 
foot bent down, and the nails set into the ground to give him foothold, even 
as a bird turns its claws inwards as it sits on a branch ” (S. R. Crockett : 
Mad Sir U chtred of the Hills, chap. ix.). I went on to say : “ In 
making these statements I am fully aware of Ellis’s criticism that such 
positions, if not ‘ impossible,’ are ‘ unnatural ’ and ‘ bad art.’ But such 
criticism is the outcome of a particular way of looking at the study of 
function. Some writers, studying the structure of the foot, cannot free 
themselves quite from the trammels of long habit, and yield to the tempta- 
tion to deduce function from structure instead of from action. So confident 
