PUBERTY CUSTOMS. 939

the sixteenth year. The young Athenians were supposed to reach that age
only at eighteen, while the Hebrew boys were regarded as pubescent at
thirteen. Six months thereafter the latter were bound by all the laws that
affected adults.

As to the Dénés, Dall places at twelve or fourteen the age of puberty
among the Alaskanst. According to Hearne, some of the eastern girls have
their first menses in their thirteenth year, while others are still reckoned
children at sixteen*. But Harmon is evidently astray when he says that the
virginal dress is worn “from the age of eight to eleven’ ’. I should think
fifteen a good average for the dawn of womanhood among the western
Déné girls.

Over and above the Jewish observances noted in our last section, super-
stition was responsible for quite a few more in the west. Before we enumerate
ihem, we may well ask ourselves if the impromptu distribution of clothes by
the father of a girl reaching puberty could not be regarded as a feeble echo
of another ordinance of Leviticus, which has transmitted in a form slightly
disfigured by time and peculiar social conditions the Mosaical obligation of
making an offering to wipe out any legal uncleanness incurred*. The Déné
father certainly thought that he shared the uncleanness of his daughter, in the
same way as the progenitor of twins deemed himself unclean after the birth
of the latter, and this offering of property, not to a priest who did not exist,
but to the assembled community which represented the tribe, was, to use the
expression current among the Carriers, intended to “wash out his shame’.

Fig. 63.

Upon attaining womanhood, the girl’s fingers, wrists and legs at the
ankles and immediately below the knees were encircled, in the latter tribe,
with ornamental rings and bracelets of sinew intended as a protection against
the terrible influences of which she had become possessed.

Moreover, to avoid contact with the vessel containing the water she drank
and, at the same time, be the more inclined to curtail the quantity of the
same, the pubescent maid had to use a tube made of a swan bone (fig. 63).
A neglect of this observance was considered tantamount to courting serious

1 «Travels on the Yukon”, p. 202.
= On, Bix, WD GG,

3 “An Account’, &c., loc. cit.

“ Lev., V.