When the Roman Catholic priests first settled in Egypt, they did not neglect supporting their mission by temporal advantages, and small presents given to needy people their proselytes; but mistaking this excision of the Coptish women for a ceremony performed upon Judaical principles, they forbade, upon pain of excommunication, that excision should be performed upon the children of parents who had become Catholics. The converts obeyed, the children grew up, and arrived at puberty; but the consequences of having obeyed the interdict were, that the man found, by chusing a wife among Catholic Cophts, he subjected himself to a very disagreeable inconveniency, to which he had conceived an unconquerable aversion, and therefore he married a heretical wife, free from this objection, and with her he relapsed into heresy. The missionaries therefore finding it impossible that ever their congregation could increase, and that this accident did frustrate all their labours, laid their case before the College of Cardinals _de propaganda fide_, at Rome. These took it up as a matter of moment, which it really was, and sent over visitors skilled in surgery, fairly to report upon the case as it stood; and they, on their return, declared, that the heat of the climate, or some other natural cause, did, in that particular nation, invariably alter the formation so as to make a difference from what was ordinary in the sex in other countries, and that this difference did occasion a disgust, which must impede the consequences for which matrimony was instituted. The college, upon this report, ordered that a declaration, being first made by the patient and her parents that it was not done from Judaical intention, but because it disappointed the ends of marriage, “Si modo matrimonii fructus impediret id omnino tollendum esset:” that the imperfection was, by all manner of means, to be removed; so that the Catholics, as well as the Cophts, in Egypt, undergo excision ever since. This is done with a knife, or razor, by women generally when the child is about eight years old[109]. There is another ceremony with which I shall close, and this regards the women also, and I shall call it _incision_. This is an usage frequent, and still retained among the Jews, though positively prohibited by the law: “Thou shalt not cut thy face for the sake of, or on account of the dead[110].” As soon as a near relation dies in Abyssinia, a brother or parent, cousin-german or lover, every woman in that relation, with the nail of her little finger, which she leaves long on purpose, cuts the skin of both her temples, about the size of a sixpence; and therefore you see either a wound or a scar in every fair face in Abyssinia; and in the dry season, when the camp is out, from the loss of friends they seldom have liberty to heal till peace and the army return with the rains.