lacerating the face, are found the whole world over at times and among all races. The former hardly concerns us here, but it is interesting to inquire into the idea which lay at the root of this “cuttings in the flesh for the dead.” This practice existed in antiquity among the Assyrians, the Arabs, the Scythians and such peoples as the Moabites, the Philistines, and the Phœnicians.[29] Jordanes tells us that Attila was lamented, “not with womanly wailing, empty coronach and tears, but with the blood of warriors and strong men.”[30] Among many African tribes, among the Polynesians of Tahiti, the Sandwich Islands and the whole Pacific Archipelago; among the Aborigines of Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania; among the Patagonians; among the Indians of California and North America; as among very many other races, mourning for the dead is always accompanied by the laceration of the body until blood freely flows, and it is even not unknown for relatives of the deceased to inflict terrible mutilations upon themselves, and he who is most pitiless and most barbarous is esteemed to show the greater honour and respect to the departed. The important point lies in the fact that blood must be shed, and this appears to constitute some covenant with the dead, so that by freely bestowing what he requires they prevent him from returning to deprive them of it forcibly and in the most terrifying circumstances. If they are not willing to feed him with their blood he will come back and take it from them, so naturally it is believed to be far better to give without demur and gain the protection of the ghost, rather than to defuse what the phantom will inevitably seize upon in vengeance and in wrath.
Many Australian tribes considered blood to be the best remedy for a sick and weakly person, and there is, of course, no small modicum of truth in the idea when we consider the scientific transfusion of blood as is practised in certain cases by doctors at the present time, a remedy of which there are many examples in the middle ages and in later medicine.[31] Bonney, the Australian traveller, tells us that among certain tribes on the Darling River in New South Wales, “a very sick or weak person is fed upon blood which the male friends provide, taken from their bodies in the way already described,”[32] that is to say by opening a vein of the forearm and allowing the blood to run into a wooden bowl or some similar vessel. “It
