66 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

pelves in the females is usually very gradual among the northern tribes. In
some cases the enlargement of the mamme never takes place.

This reminds me of the wild statements which have occasionally found
their way in the works of even reputable authors with regard to the extra-
ordinary dimensions attained by that part of the female anatomy among the
American and other primitive races. Some of these assertions would indeed
task the credulity of the most simple minded scholar. Thus we read in
Hakluyt’s Collection! that the breasts of some women are so long that the
latter have to lay them on the ground and lie down by them. Bruce asserts
that in some of the Shangallas they hang down to the knees. Mentzelius
tells us that purses are made in great numbers from the breasts of the Hottentot
females, and sold at the Cape of Good Hope?. Of the Carrier women Harmon
says that they nurse their children while these are suspended at their backs
“either by throwing their breasts over their shoulders or under their arms’”®.

Though the above statements savour more or less of exaggeration, there
is no doubt that the Déné mamma, especially with women who have borne
several children, are very flaccid and pendulous. I can testify to the truth
of Harmon’s declaration as regards the latter part of the same. As to nursing
iheir children over their shoulders, I have never seen as much; but an iden-
tical process is said to have been at least occasionally resorted to even by
the women of old Ireland. Lithgow writes: “I saw, in Ireland’s north parts,
women travayling the way, or toiling at home, carry their infants about their
teckes, and laying the dugges over their shoulders, would give sucke to the
babes behinde their backs, without taking them in their arms”?

A Remarkable Physiological Phenomenon.

A case which would seem much less credible than that of tne fabulousiy
long mamme of our females, and to which I would not even dare call atten-
tion were it not “so well authenticated”, as Sir John Franklin assures us, is
the following, which I shall quote after him from Richardson’s Journal.

“A young Chipewyan had separated from the rest of his band for ihe
purpose of trenching beaver, when his wife, who was his sole companion, and
in her first pregnancy, was seized with the pains of labour. She died on the
third day after she had given birth to a boy. The husband was inconsolable,
and vowed in his anguish never to take another woman to wile, but his grief
was soon in some degree absorbed in anxiety for the fate of his infant son.
To preserve its life he descended to the office of nurse, so degrading in the
eyes of a Chipewyan, as partaking of the duties of a woman. He swaddled

* Vol. Il, p. 26.

? “A Voyage to Hudson’s Bay”, p. 58.

> “An Account of the Indians living west of the Rocky Mountains”, p. 273.
* “«Raire Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations”, p. 433.