the blood royal are strangled.[1] In Ashantee the blood of none of the royal family may be shed; if one of them is guilty of a great crime he is drowned in the river Dah.[2] In Madagascar the blood of nobles might not be shed; hence when four Christians of that class were to be executed they were burned alive.[3] When a young king of Uganda comes of age all his brothers are burnt except two or three, who are preserved to keep up the succession.[4] The reluctance to shed royal blood seems to be only a particular case of a general reluctance to shed blood or at least to allow it to fall on the ground. Marco Polo tells us that in his day persons found on the streets of Cambaluc (Pekin) at unseasonable hours were arrested, and if found guilty of a misdemeanour were beaten with a stick. “Under this punishment people sometimes die, but they adopt it in order to eschew bloodshed, for their Bacsis say that it is an evil thing to shed man’s blood.”[5] When Captain Christian was shot by the Manx Government at the Restoration in 1660, the spot on which he stood was covered with white blankets, that his blood might not fall on the ground.[6] Amongst some primitive peoples, when the blood of a tribesman has to be shed it is not suffered to fall upon the ground, but is received upon the bodies of his fellow tribesmen. Thus in some Australian tribes boys who are being circumcised are laid on a platform, formed by the living bodies of the tribesmen;[7] and when a boy’s tooth
- ↑ Baron’s “Description of the Kingdom of Tonqueen,” in Pinkerton’s Voyages and Travels, ix. 691.
- ↑ T. E. Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1873), p. 207.
- ↑ Sibree, Madagascar and its People, p. 430.
- ↑ C. T. Wilson and R. W. Felkin, Uganda and the Egyptian Soudan, i. 200.
- ↑ Marco Polo, i. 399, Yule’s translation, 2d ed.
- ↑ Sir Walter Scott, note 2 to Peveril of the Peak, ch. v.
- ↑ Native Tribes of South Australia,
