Note 38 — Chapter III

Speaking of a tribe which he found upon the banks of the Darling, Mitchell says, “The men retained all their front teeth, and had no scarifications on their bodies, two most unfashionable peculiarities among the aborigines.” (Mitchell’s Three Expeditions, vol. i. p. 261.) The same intelligent traveller accounts for the custom of knocking out the teeth, by supposing it a typical sacrifice, probably derived from early sacrificial rites. The cutting off the last joint of the little finger of females, (he adds,) seems a custom of the same kind. It is a curious observation, that the more ferocious among the natives on the Darling were those tribes that had not lost their front teeth.—Vol. ii. p. 345, and vol. i. p. 304.