PERSONAL ADORNMENI AND DEFORMATION. 81

cannot help comparing it to that of the Chinese with regard to their infant
daughters},

Large eyes were as fashionable with the Carriers as small feet with the
Loucheux. So the mothers did their best — with what results one can easily
guess — to secure such for their babes by frequent manipulation on their
eye sockets. An analogous treatment of the lower limbs was supposed to
prevent them from becoming bow-legged.

It is rather unusual to class circumcision under the head of bodily muti-
lations, because wherever practised it partakes more of a ritual or religious
character than of the nature of a surgical operation or the care of one’s
physique. In spite of Father Petitot’s insistence on the subject, I long thought
that I would never have to speak of it except to throw doubt on the
correctness of his surmises in that connection, surmises or assertions which
seemed to me prompted mostly by the requirements of a thesis which I cannot
make mine. But here is a passage from Mackenzie’s Voyages which forces me
to reverse my opinion in this respect. The explorer refers to a group of
twenty-five or thirty persons of the Slave and Dog-Rib tribes, whom he was
the first white man to meet. “Whether circumcision was practised among
them I cannot pretend to say”, he writes; “but the appearance of it was
general among those whom | saw’2. As he had excellent opportunities of
ascertaining this particularity, this remark paves the way towards accepting
Petitot’s assertions on the same subject.

These are to the effect that the Loucheux and the Hares circumcised
their male children a few days after birth with a flake of silex, after which
the wound was healed by an application of pulverized pyrite mixed with
grease. This information was imparted to him by an old Loucheux chieftainness
and an old female shaman belonging to the Hare tribe3.

Those hyperborean people intended circumcision simply as a means of
warding off two different kinds of cutaneous diseases in which the learned
missionary recognized a great similarity with leprosy.

Another form of bodily deformation practised with a cutting tool seems
to have been as exact a reproduction of a custom formerly in honour among
ancient nations. I mean self-mutilation for the dead. This prevailed among
the Assyrians and the Persians. Moses and other inspired writers inveigh
against it, and, coming to a later date, we read that at the death of Attila
his followers cut themselves with knives. Cutting off a finger-joint on the
loss of a child or of a beloved husband was a frequent occurrence within

1 “Arctic Searching Expedition’, vol. I, p. 384.

? “Voyages from Montreal”, vol. I, p. 235.

3 Monographie, p. XXXVI. Fr. Petitot is slightly astray when he refers his reader to
Mackenzie’s text as corroborating his statement with regard to the Hare Indians. Mackenzie
mentions only the Slaves and the Dog-Ribs. But this very oversight has this advantage that it
makes us realize that the practice was common to four, instead of two, Déné tribes.

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