The women are said to restrict their exhibitions of grief to the colours alone, but the men extend their signs of woe to plastering the head with white clay, which their respect will not allow them to remove; time alone has the power of assuaging their sorrow by crumbling the nightcap to pieces. As the women work or hunt for food while the men sit in the wurley all day, this excess of pain and grief is probably nothing more than an excess of laziness, especially as it lasts from one to two months at a time. The red earth or ruddle is found in one spot only in the northern country, somewhere near the gorge in the Hayward Range. This is much celebrated, and is sought after by every tribe far and near; and although these tribes are hostile to each other, and on any other occasion to meet would be to fight, like the North-American Indian and his “Pipe-stone Quarry,” the Ruddle plain is neutral ground on which Bushmen foes may meet and dig in harmony. [Illustration: Australian Weapons.] [Illustration: Polynesian War Canoe.] PART VIII. SAVAGE M.D.’s. CHAPTER XX. Polynesian Surgeons--Figian treatment--A shipwrecked Figian--Samoan Priests and Doctors--Samoan physics--Polynesian Disease-makers--Namaquan cruelty--Left to die--Savage arithmetic--Bartering for Sheep--The Abiadiongs--A Pawnee M.D.--An Indian Sawbones--A medicine dance--An Indian vapour bath--Cupping three Queens--What is expected of a Physician--Hints to Travellers in the East--Stimulants to be avoided in the East--Cold water bathing in Nubia. The science of surgery and medicine, as practised among savages, forms not the least curious and interesting feature in the story of their lives. Since they have as a rule no belief in natural or unavoidable death, it follows that natural or unavoidable sickness, as being the agents of death, are no more faithfully entertained. Unlike us, who have a name for the thousand ills that afflict us--from tooth-rash to elephantiasis--the savage has but one name for all the diseases he is acquainted with, and that one name is--the devil. Ague--and it is the devil within the man shaking his limbs; rheumatism, myriads of tiny imps are under the skin nibbling the wretched sufferer’s bones; stomach-ache, tooth-ache, head-ache--it is the devil, and nobody and nothing else.