Mr. F. Bonney read a paper on “Some Customs of the Aborigines of the River Darling,” before the Anthropological Society of Great Britain, May 8th, 1883, in which the process of curing diseases is described. He says: “On one occasion, when I was camped in the Purnanga Ranges, I watched by the light of a camp-fire a doctor at work, sucking the back of a woman who was suffering from pains in that part. While she sat on a log a few yards distant from the camp-fire, he moved about her, making certain passes with boughs which he held, and then sucked for some time the place where pain was felt; at last he took something from his mouth, and, holding it towards the firelight, declared it to be a piece of bone. The old women sitting near loudly expressed their satisfaction at his success. I asked to be allowed to look at it, and it was given to me. I carelessly looked at it, and then pretended to throw it into the fire, but, keeping it between my fingers, I placed it in my pocket, when I could do so unobserved; and on the following morning, when I examined it by daylight, it proved to be a small splinter of wood, and not bone. At the time the patient appeared to be very much relieved by the treatment.” Another mode of treatment described by Mr. Bonney is that of sucking poison, supposed to have been sent into the patient by an enemy, through a string. The patient complained of sickness in the stomach; the woman doctor placed the patient on her back on the ground, tied a string round the middle of her naked body, leaving a loose end about eighteen inches long. The doctress then began sucking the string, passing the loose end through her mouth, from time to time spitting blood and saliva into a pot. She repeated this many times, until the patient professed to be cured. The people of Timor-laut, near the island of New Guinea, scar themselves on the arms and shoulders with red-hot stones, in imitation of immense small-pox marks, in order to ward off that disease.[62] Among the Kaffirs diseases are all attributed to three causes—either to being enchanted by an enemy, to the anger of certain beings whose abode appears to be in the rivers, or to the power of evil spirits.[63] “Among the Kalmucks,” says Lubbock, “the cures are effected by exorcising the evil spirit. This is the business of the so-called ‘priests,’ who induce the evil spirit to quit the body of the patient and enter some other object. If a chief is ill, some other person is induced to take his name, and then, as is supposed, the evil spirit passes into his body.”[64]