Freycinet saw in Timor, Straits of Malacca, "a score of human jawbones, which we wished to purchase; but all our offers were met by the word 'pamali,' meaning sacred."[190]
In one of the "morais" or temples entered by Kotzebue in 1818, on the Sandwich Islands, there were two great and ugly idols, one representing a man, the other a woman. "The priests made me notice that both statues, which had their mouths wide open, were furnished with a row of human teeth."[191]
The Sandwich Islanders kept the jaw bones of their enemies as trophies.[192] King Tamaahmaah had a "spitbox which was set round with human teeth, and had belonged to several of his predecessors."[193]
Among some of the Australian tribes the women wear about their necks the teeth which have been knocked out of the mouths of the boys at a certain age.[194] This custom of the Australians does not obtain among the North American tribes, by whom the teeth, as they fall out, are carefully hidden or buried under some tree or rock. At least, I have been so informed by several persons, among others by Chato, one of the principal men of the Chiricahua Apache.
Molina speaks of the customs of the Araucanians, who, after torturing their captives to death, made war flutes out of their bones and used the skulls for drinking vessels.[195] The Abipones of Paraguay make the bones of their enemies into musical instruments.[196]
The preceding practice is strictly in line with the "medicinal" and "magical" values attached in Europe to human teeth, human skin, etc. The curious reader may find much on this subject in the works of Frommann, Beckherius, Etmüller, Samuel Augustus Flemming, and others of the seventeenth century, where it will be shown that the ideas of the people of Europe of that period were only in name superior to those of the savages of America, the islands of the South Seas, and of Central Africa. In my work upon "The Scatalogic Rites of all Nations" I have treated this matter more in extenso, but what is here adduced will be sufficient for the present article.
The skin of Ziska, the Bohemian reformer, was made into a "medicine drum" by his followers.
THE SCRATCH STICK.
When Gen. Crook's expedition against the Chiricahua Apache reached the heart of the Sierra Madre, Mexico, in 1883, it was my good fortune to find on the ground in Geronimo's rancheria two insignificant looking articles of personal equipment, to which I learned the Apache attached the greatest importance. One of these was a very small piece of hard wood, cedar, or pine, about two and a half to three inches long and half a finger in thickness, and the other a small section of the cane indigenous to the Southwest and of about the same dimensions. The first was the scratch stick and the second the drinking reed.