554 Proceedings of lloyal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
says that in the museum at Florence are seven skulls, collected 
by D’Albertis in the Fly River district, which have designs carved 
on the frontal bone. He also refers to a statement made by the 
Rev. James Chalmers,* who saw at Maipua, a village west of 
Bald Head in the Papuan Gulf, human and other bones, which 
were carved and in many instances painted. The evidence there- 
fore now before us points to the Papuan Gulf as the region in 
which it is customary to carve the skulls of the dead with various 
designs. The crania which I have seen from the south-east 
coast of Hew Guinea, and the large collection brought by Dr A. B. 
Meyer from Geelvink Bay in the north-west of the island, did not 
show any examples of decorative sculpturing. 
Seven of the skulls were those of men, one was probably a 
woman, and two were youths, possibly girls, about 15 or 16 
years of age. The skulls had obviously been preserved in the 
huts of the natives, for they were blackened with smoke. In 
five specimens the facial bones had been smeared with a red 
pigment. Two crania had bunches of red grass tied around the 
zygomatic arches. In all the specimens, with one exception, the 
lower jaw was kept in place by a band, formed sometimes of split 
cane, at others of twisted vegetable fibre, which had been passed 
through the nose, immediately above the floor, and carried round 
the hard palate and symphysis menti, in front of the latter of 
which it was in most instances secured by a knot. Through each 
ascending ramus a hole had been bored, and a piece of split cane 
or a string of twisted vegetable fibre had been passed through it, 
and secured to the zygomatic arch (fig. 1). As a rule the necks 
of the teeth in each jaw were enclosed in loops of string, which 
secured them together, and retained them in their sockets.! In 
some of the skulls the teeth were in place and stained, but in 
others they had to some extent dropped out or been removed, 
and pieces of wood or cane had been substituted for them, . and 
stained black like the teeth. 
The most interesting features of these skulls were the decorative 
* Pioneering in New Guinea, 1887. 
f With two exceptions the figures in illustration are from photographs of 
the skulls kindly taken for me by Mr W. E. Carnegie Dickson, B.Sc. Figs. 3 
and 5 are from pen and ink sketches by Dr David Hepburn, which show more 
clearly than the photographs the scratched character of the designs. 
