The Indonesian methods of preserving the dead are found in Seram (W. J. Perry), and the report recently published by Lorenz[16] (=43=, p. 22) records a similar practice in the neighbourhood of Doré Bay in North-West New Guinea. The corpse was tied to the rafter of the dwelling-house; and the practice of mixing the juices of decomposition with the food is in vogue also. The accounts given by D’Albertis (=1=) and other travellers show that analogous customs are found at other places in New Guinea. There can be no doubt that the practice spread along the north coast of the island and then around its eastern extremity to reach the islands of the Torres Straits, where the practice is seen in its fully developed form, as Flower (=19=), Haddon and Myers (=25=), and Hamlyn-Harris (=27=) have described. As I have already referred to Papuan mummies earlier in this communication and at some future time intend to devote a special memoir to the full discussion of the methods of the Torres Straits embalmers, I shall not go into the matter in detail here. I should like, however, to call special attention to the admirable account given by Haddon and Myers (=25=) of the associated funeral rites. In his memoir Flower described two interesting mummies, then in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, one “brought in 1872 from Darnley Island in Torres Strait by Mr. Charles Lemaistre, Captain of the French barque ‘Victorine,’ and the other, an Australian mummy, obtained in 1845 near Adelaide, by Sir George Grey.” By a curious and utterly incomprehensible act of vandalism these extremely rare and priceless ethnological specimens were deliberately destroyed by Sir William Flower, who naively explains his extraordinary action by the statement “as the skeleton will form a more instructive specimen when the dried and decaying integuments are removed I have had it cleaned” (p. 393)! He treated in the same manner the second mummy, the only example of its kind, so far as I am aware, in this country! His photographs show that these two specimens, so far from being “decaying,” were in a remarkably good state of preservation at the time he doomed them to destruction. Captain Lemaistre found the Torres Strait mummy “in its grave, which consisted of a high straw and bamboo hut of round form: it was not lying down, but standing up on the stretcher” (=19=, p. 389). This is a close parallel to the African customs—mummification, burial in a house of round form, and fixing the corpse to a rough form of funeral bier, which is stood up in the house. The skin was painted red, the scalp black. “The sockets of the eyes were filled with a dark brown substance, apparently a vegetable gum.... In this was imbedded a narrow oval piece of mother of pearl, pointed at each end, in the centre of the anterior surface of which is fixed a round mass of the same resinous substance, representing the pupil of the eye” (p. 301). “Both nostrils had been distended.”