The Tugeri are a fine race, very fierce, and absolutely unspoiled by European vices. The men stand about 5 feet 8 inches on an average, and are clean-limbed, powerful fellows, capable of any amount of endurance. As a race, they are broad-shouldered, sinewy, and of enormous strength. No European can draw their bow. This weapon is made of a longitudinal section of the bamboo. Near the grip the diameter is about 3½ inches, and the wood tapers at each end to a diameter of ¾–inch. The string is of twisted fibre, and the arrow, which is made of a reed, carries to a distance of at least 300 yards. Like all savages, they are admirable marksmen. [Illustration: THE NATIVE METHOD OF TREE CLIMBING. ] In the typical Merauke Tugeri the head is rather conical, and the forehead high but receding. The hair is sparse, beginning well up on the cranium, and falling in long strands to the middle of the back beyond the shoulder blades. The hair is plaited with grass and string, and from the plait at the back rises a single osprey feather. The eyebrows are straight and meeting, the eyes black, large, and heavy. The nose is broad and flat, but with a prominent bridge, the mouth degraded and fatuous, but the lips neither so thick nor so protruding as the negro’s. The ears lie fairly flat to the head, and are not abnormally large. The men wear an enormous ear ornament of bamboo bent into an open ring. Round the periphery of this ring the flesh of the lobe of the ear, previously perforated, is stretched in infancy, and as the individual grows the natural spring of the bamboo stretches the flesh more and more, until in manhood a loop is formed big enough to hold a ring of at least 4 inches in diameter. It is extraordinary how the tribesmen contrive to move amidst the tangled forest without hindrance from this abnormal expansion of the lobe, the most unusual flesh decoration to be found amongst mankind. When the bamboo is out the loop hangs like a long pendant, a perfect skein of flesh, a peculiarly hideous accessory of savage adornment. Some of the Tugeri wear an apology for a beard, or rather two scraggy tufts of hair depending from each side of the chin. The use of pomatum in any form is unknown. The teeth are strong and fairly regular, but perfectly brown, owing to the habit of chewing the betel-nut.