HORN EXPEDITION—ANTHROPOLOGY. 
33 
There is still more difficulty in assigning a decorative origin to subincision 
than circumcision. Like the latter, the former, though common, is by no means 
universal in Australia, and, as has already been observed, the effect of the 
operation is not readily evident to the eye. The incision itself is certainly not 
visible and, though perhaps, a slight abnormality, in size or form, which may not 
be obvious to the stranger amongst them, may be readily recognised by their own 
race, it seems difficult to attach a decorative origin to a mutilation which is so 
little conspicuous when ostentation is the primary object of decorative methods, 
and, for this reason, I hesitate to accept a theory which assigns such an origin 
to the practice in question. 
Undoubtedly, the view which is almost universally held by white colonists, 
and indeed hy many anthropologists, is that the operation of subincision is intended 
to diminish the chances of procreation with a view of keeping the population 
within limits—the limits being primarily those required and defined by the 
potentialities of the food supply, and secondarily by the special trouble and 
difficulty in rearing children under the circumstances of their nomadic lives—and 
attempts have been made to show that those tribes which do carry out this 
singular practice are those most liable to the conditions which bring about these 
difficulties. The same view is not infrequently either directly stated or implied 
by the natives themselves, and Mr. Kempe, Manager of the Peake Station on the 
west side of Lake Eyre, informs me that cei’tain individuals are there deliberately 
left without operation so that they may be free from the disabilities of their 
mutilated fellows. 
And, if indeed it could be shown that the practice is limited to hunger- 
stricken districts, this view would receive strong support. But this is just what 
cannot be done. Beference to a map* indicating geographically the areas in which 
this mutilation, so far as it is known, is practiced, will satisfy any one w'ith a 
knowdedge of the Australian Continent, that subincision is practised in regions 
in which (at least before settlement) food supplies were plentiful, while in 
others, far inferior in this respect, the operation is not in force. So again, 
as has been mentioned, of two adjacent tribes living under exactly the same 
physical conditions, one may be subject to the mutilation, the other not. 
And if it be urged that the universal performance of subincision throughout the 
whole of Central Australia—where to say the least of it, the conditions of existence 
are not generally speaking too favourable—is an argument in favour of the 
Malthusian view, it may also be said that the custom is found existing in the 
* “The Australian Raoe.” Curr, vol. iv. 
G 
