the African tribes the young maids have an ordeal
approaching to circumcision that they must pass when near the age of
thirteen, this rite bearing precisely the same relation regarding their
entrance into the state of womanhood that male circumcision denotes the
entrance into manhood on the part of the males among the Bassoutos. At
the appointed time the maids are gathered together and conducted to the
riverbank; they are placed under the care of expert matrons. They here
reside, after having undergone a kind of baptism; they are maltreated,
punished, and abused by the old women, with a view of making them hardy
and insensible to pain; they are also schooled in the science and art of
African household duties. Among the Gallinas of Sierra Leone, in
addition to the other observances, the clitoris of the young maid is
excised at midnight, while the moon is at its full, after which they
receive their name by which they are to be known through life. The
initiation of each sex into these mysteries is exclusively for the sex
engaged, and it would be as fatal for a man to steal into the camp of
the women during the performance of these ceremonies as it would be
fatal for a woman to enter a _mapato_ where the young men are undergoing
their ordeal. After their initiation into womanhood, the maids live by
themselves, similarly to the young men, until they marry.

Lafargue relates that among the Australians circumcision is held in such
importance that tribes at war will suspend all hostilities and meet in
peace during the observance or performance of the rite. Here, again, we
have a repetition, with a slight variation, of the practices of the
Bassoutos,--something which gives some countenance to the hero-warrior
idea of the origin of circumcision advanced by Bergmann. The Australian
warriors go through a mimic battle, and, after a series of combats,
finally capture the boys aged about from thirteen to fourteen years,
whom they bear away amidst the cries and lamentations of the mothers and
other female relatives, who, in their excess of grief, mutilate
themselves by cutting gashes into their thighs, so that they bleed
profusely. The boys are, in the meantime, carried to some out-of-the-way
place, where an old man, perched on a tree or some rising ground,
through the means of a musical instrument made of a deal-board and human
hair, announced that the rite is in process of performance, so that
neither women nor children might approac