29.  Dall, Alaska and its Resources, Cambridge, U.S., 1870.

30.  Dall saw it in Alaska, Jacobsen at Ignitok in the vicinity of the Bering Strait.  Gilbert Sproat mentions it among the Vancouver indians; and Dr. Rink, who describes the periodical exhibitions just mentioned, adds:  “The principal use of the accumulation of personal wealth is for periodically distributing it.”  He also mentions (loc. cit. p. 31) “the destruction of property for the same purpose,” (of maintaining equality).

31.  See Appendix viii.

32.  Veniaminoff, Memoirs relative to the District of Unalashka (Russian), 3 vols.  St. Petersburg, 1840.  Extracts, in English, from the above are given in Dall’s Alaska.  A like description of the Australians’ morality is given in Nature, xlii. p. 639.

33.  It is most remarkable that several writers (Middendorff, Schrenk, O. Finsch) described the Ostyaks and Samoyedes in almost the same words.  Even when drunken, their quarrels are insignificant.  “For a hundred years one single murder has been committed in the tundra;” “their children never fight;” “anything may be left for years in the tundra, even food and gin, and nobody will touch it;” and so on.  Gilbert Sproat “never witnessed a fight between two sober natives” of the Aht Indians of Vancouver Island.  “Quarrelling is also rare among their children.” (Rink, loc. cit.) And so on.

34.  Gill, quoted in Gerland and Waitz’s Anthropologie, v. 641.  See also pp. 636-640, where many facts of parental and filial love are quoted.

35.  Primitive Folk, London, 1891.

36.  Gerland, loc. cit. v. 636.

37.  Erskine, quoted in Gerland and Waitz’s Anthropologie, v. 640.

38.  W.T.  Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, London, 1866, p. 363.

39.  It is remarkable, however, that in case of a sentence of death, nobody will take upon himself to be the executioner.  Every one throws his stone, or gives his blow with the hatchet, carefully avoiding to give a mortal blow.  At a later epoch, the priest will stab the victim with a sacred knife.  Still later, it will be the king, until civilization invents the hired hangman.  See Bastian’s deep remarks upon this subject in Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii.  Die Blutrache, pp. 1-36.  A remainder of this tribal habit, I am told by Professor E. Nys, has survived in military executions till our own times.  In the middle portion of the nineteenth century it was the habit to load the rifles of the twelve soldiers called out for shooting the condemned victim, with eleven ball-cartridges and one blank cartridge.  As the soldiers never knew who of them had the latter, each one could console his disturbed conscience by thinking that he was not one of the murderers.

40.  In Africa, and elsewhere too, it is a widely-spread habit, that if a theft has been committed, the next clan has to restore the equivalent of the stolen thing, and then look itself for the thief.  A. H. Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Leipzig, 1887, vol. i. p. 77.