the moment when a lad is being subincised. The operation is performed at a distance from, but within hearing of, the women’s camp. When the boy is seized in order to be operated on, the men of the {p94} party raise a loud shout of “Pirr-rr.” At that sound the women immediately assemble in their camp, and the boy’s mother cuts gashes across the stomach and shoulders of the boy’s sisters, her own elder sisters, an old woman who furnished the boy with a sacred fire at circumcision, and all the women whose daughters he would be allowed to marry; and while she cuts she imitates the sound made by the men who are subincising her son. These cuts generally leave behind them a definite series of scars; they have a name of their own (_urpma_), and are often represented by definite lines on the bull-roarers.​[317] What the exact meaning of this extraordinary ceremony may be, I cannot say; but perhaps one of its supposed effects may be to relieve the boy’s pain by transferring it to his women-kind. In like manner, when the Warramunga men are fighting each other with blazing torches, the women burn themselves with lighted twigs in the belief that by so doing they prevent the men from inflicting serious injuries on each other.​[318] The theory further receives some support from certain practices formerly observed by the natives inhabiting the coast of New South Wales. Before lads had their noses bored, the medicine men threw themselves into contortions on the ground, and after pretending to suffer great pain were delivered of bones, which were to be used at the ceremony of nose-boring. The lads were told that the more the medicine men suffered, the less pain they themselves would feel.​[319] Again, among the same natives, when a woman was in labour, a female friend would tie one end of a cord round the sufferer’s neck and rub her own gums with the other end till they bled,​[320] probably in order to draw away the pain from the mother to herself. For a similar reason, perhaps, in Samoa, while blood was being drawn from a virgin bride, her friends, young and old, beat their heads with stones till they bled.​[321] [Sidenote: Fertilising virtue attributed to blood of circumcision and subincision. Fertilising virtue attributed to foreskin. Belief of the Central Australian tribes in the reincarnation of the dead.]