Tattooing is still kept up to some extent, and is a regular profession, just as house-building, and well paid. The custom is traced to Taēmā and Tilafainga; and they were worshipped by the tattooers as the presiding deities of their craft. The instrument used in the operation is an oblong piece of human bone (_os ilium_), about an inch and a half broad and two inches long. A time of war and slaughter was a harvest for the tattooers to get a supply of instruments. The one end is cut like a small-toothed comb, and the other is fastened to a piece of cane, and looks like a little serrated adze. They dip it into a mixture of candle-nut ashes and water, and, tapping it with a little mallet, it sinks into the skin, and in this way they puncture the whole surface over which the tattooing extends. The greater part of the body, from the waist down to the knee is covered with it, variegated here and there with neat regular stripes of the untattooed skin, which when they are well oiled, make them appear in the distance as if they had on black silk knee-breeches. Behrens, in describing these natives in his narrative of Roggewein’s voyage of 1772, says: “They were clothed from the waist downwards with fringes and a kind of silken stuff artificially wrought.” A nearer inspection would have shown that the fringes were a bunch of red _ti_ leaves (_Dracæna terminalis_) glistening with cocoa-nut oil, and the “kind of silken stuff,” the tattooing just described. As it extends over such a large surface the operation is a tedious and painful affair. After smarting and bleeding for awhile under the hands of the tattooers, the patience of the youth is exhausted. They then let him rest and heal for a time, and, before returning to him again, do a little piece on each of the party. In two or three months the whole is completed. The friends of the young men are all the while in attendance with food. They also bring quantities of fine mats and native cloth, as the hire of the tattooers; connected with them, too, are many waiting on for a share in the food and property. Among the fellahs, as well as among the laboring people of the cities, the women tattoo their chin, their forehead, the middle of the breast, a portion of their hands and arms, as well as feet, with indelible marks of blue and green. In Upper Egypt most females puncture their lips to give them a dark bluish hue. See Featherman, Social Hist. of the Races of Mankind, V, 1881, p. 545. * * * * * Professor Brauns, of Halle, reports (Science, III, No. 50, p. 69) that among the Ainos of Yazo the women tattoo their chins to imitate the beards of the men. * * * * * The antiquity of tattooing in the eastern hemisphere is well established. With reference to the Hebrews, and the tribes surrounding them, the following Biblical texts may be in point: