THE SISSANO COMMUNITY. 17 
manner all who have helped in the ceremony must be rewarded. Such a 
feast naturally brings its giver to the edge of domestic ruin, but that never 
turns Papuan hair gray. So long as he has something on hand he lives 
happily. (Page 382.) 
In the same fashion we shall assemble from Friederici the stray 
mention of this people which is scattered through his ‘‘Deutsch- 
Neuguinea.”’ 
In New Guinea I observed remarkably many instances of the Jewish cast 
of features in the Arop-Sissano region. Among the Anuda folk are several 
quite extraordinarily corpulent persons, such as I have encountered in the 
same degree only in the atoll Uluthi (Mogemog) of the western Carolines 
and in the case of one man among the Melanesian Sissano. (Page 28d.) 
I have been able to examine but two new-born children in the course of 
my travels, one in Kung, northern New Hanover, one in Sissano. <A small 
child of Javanese parents in Hollandia, Humboldt Bay, was already two days 
old when I saw it. In none of these children was the blue birth-mark, the | 
Mongol spot, present; in skin pigmentation all three were noticeably lighter 
than their mothers. (Page 320.) 
While the glowing end of a coconut shell (the end where the eyes are) 
is employed for the burning of small scar ornament, the people in the present 
time use red-hot bottle necks for the production of larger annular scars. 
Similar scar ornament occurs in north New Guinea at Garget and in the 
Arop-Sissano region. (Page 360.) 
I myself have traveled through large areas of New Guinea whose inhabi- 
tants were uncircumcised, for instance from Humboldt Bay over Wutung, 
Wanimo and vicinity, Leitere to Sér. Upon the Sissano, lying still farther 
east, a trader has given me vague statements as to circumcision, which unfor- 
tunately I have not established as fact. It is quite possible that such is 
the case; but, with every kind wish, the information derived from that trader, 
by reason of something lacking in his personality, is not sufficiently reliable 
to stand as fact except when corroborated (see page 13). (Page 45¢.) 
I have often observed the picking up of objects with the foot. This is 
especially frequent in the Arop-Sissano region. (Page 57a.) 
I have found in Sissano the use of the Polynesian swimming-board for 
riding the breakers, surf-riding. (Page 590). 
On the coast of northern New Guinea the people of Wanimo, Leitere, Sér, 
Sissano, and Arop have assured me that the tear-greeting was unknown to 
them. (Page 65c.) 
In the regions poorly blessed with the coconut the mothers chew up boluses 
of taro or sago for their nursing children, but quite clearly with anything 
but good results. A severe malady of the mucosa, particularly about the 
anus and the genitalia, follows this sago feeding, as I have in many cases 
observed in children of the Arop-Sissano region. ‘The lately deceased trader 
Schulz, whose testimony on this point I regard as competent, since he had 
had several Papuan women in the domestic side of his life, told me that 
this illness regularly set in as a sort of inevitable children’s sickness when 
the child was weaned and put upon a diet of this chewed sago. ‘The illness 
is very painful. Not a few succumb to it. I observed in particular a little 
girl of two or three years who lay shrieking with the pain on her father’s 
knee and rolling onto her back and then onto her belly. The genitalia and 
anus were inflamed and covered with matter and scabs. Any one who has 
ever had this disease is immune ever after. It is clearly a sickness of the wean- 
ing. (Page gid.) [This suggests frambcesia.—W. C.] 
