the south seas. In Europe it was not unknown. But the discovery
of America brought to our knowledge those races which made a fine
art of skull-deformities. At the present day the custom is still
observed by the Haidas and Chinooks, and by certain tribes of Peru
and on the Amazon, by the Kurds of Armenia, by certain Malay
peoples, in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides. The
reasons for this type of mutilation are uncertain. Probably the idea
of distinguishing themselves from lower races was predominant in
most cases, as for example in that of the Chinook Indians, who
deformed the skull to distinguish themselves from their slaves;
Or it may have been through a desire to give a ferocious appearance
to their warriors. The deformation was always done at infancy,
and often in the case of both sexes. It was, however, more usually
reserved for boys, and sometimes for a single caste, as at Tahiti.
Different methods prevailed: by bands, bandages, boards, compresses
of clay and sandbags, a continued pressure was applied to
the half-formed cranial bones to give them the desired shape.
Hand-kneading may also possibly have been employed.
3. Mutilations of the body or limbs by maiming, lopping off or deforming, are far from rare. Certain races (Bushmen, Kaffirs and Hottentots) cut off the finger joints as a sign of mourning, especially for parents. The Tongans do the same, in the belief that the evil spirits which bring diseases into the body would escape by the wound. Diseased children are thus mutilated by them. Contempt for female timidity has caused a curious custom among the Gallas (Africa). They amputate the mammae of boys soon after birth, believing no warrior can possibly be brave who possesses them. The fashion of distorting the feet of Chinese ladies of high rank has been of long continuance and only recently prohibited.
4. Mutilations of the teeth are among the most common and the most varied. They are by breaking, extracting, filing, inlaying or cutting away the crown of the teeth. Nearly every variety of dental mutilation is met with in Africa. In a tribe north-east of the Albert Nyanza it is usual to pry out with a piece of metal the four lower incisors in children of both sexes. The women of certain tribes on the Senegal force the growth of the upper incisors outwards so as to make them project beyond the lower lips. Many of the aboriginal tribes of Australia extract teeth, and at puberty the Australian boys have a tooth knocked out. The Eskimos of the Mackenzie River cut down the crown of the upper incisors so as not to resemble dogs. Some Malay races, too, are said to blacken their teeth because dogs have white teeth. This desire to be unlike animals seems to be at the bottom of many dental mutilations. Another reason is the wish to distinguish tribe from tribe. Thus some Papuans break their teeth in order to be unlike other Papuan tribes which they despise. In this way such practices become traditional. Finally, like many mutilations, those of the teeth are trials of endurance of physical pain, and take place at ceremonies of initiation and at puberty. The Mois (Stiengs) of Cochin-China break the two upper middle incisors with a flint. This is always ceremoniously done at puberty to the accompaniment of feasting and prayers for those mutilated, who will thus, it is thought, be preserved from sickness. Among Malay races the filing of teeth takes place with similar ceremony at puberty. In Java, Sumatra and Borneo the incisors are thinned down and shortened. Deep transverse grooves are also made with a file, a stone, bamboo or sand, and the teeth filed to a point. The Dyaks of Borneo make a small hole in the transverse groove and insert a pin of brass, which is hammered to a nail-head shape in the hollow, or they inlay the teeth with gold and other metals. The ancient Mexicans also inlaid the teeth with precious stones.
5. Mutilations of the sexual organs are more ethnically important than any. They have played a great part in human history, and still have much significance in many countries. Their antiquity is undoubtedly great, and nearly all originate with the idea of initiation into full sexual life. The most important, circumcision (q.v.), has been transformed into a religious rite. Infibulation (Lat. fibula, a clasp), or the attaching a ring, clasp, or buckle to the sexual organs, in females through the labia majora, in males through the prepuce, was an operation to preserve chastity very commonly practised in antiquity. At Rome it was in use; Strabo says it was prevalent in Arabia and in Egypt, and it is still native to those regions (Lane, Modern Egyptians, i. 73; Arabic Lexicon, s.v. “hafada”). Niebuhr heard that it was practised on both shores of the Persian Gulf and at Bagdad (Description de l’Arabie, p. 70). It is common in Africa (see Sir H. H. Johnston, Kilimanjaro Expedition, 1886), but is there often replaced by an operation which consists in stitching the labia majora together when the girl is four or five years old. Castration is practised in the East to supply guards for harems, and was employed in Italy until the time of Pope Leo XIII. to provide “soprani” for the papal choir; it has also been voluntarily submitted to from religious motives (see Eunuch). The operation has, however, been resorted to for other purposes. Thus in Africa it is said to have been used as a means of annihilating conquered tribes. The Hottentots and Bushmen, too, have the curious custom of removing one testicle when a boy is eight or nine years old, in the belief that this partial emasculation renders the victim fleeter of foot for the chase. The most dreadful of these mutilations is that practised by certain Australian tribes on their boys. It consists of cutting open and leaving exposed the whole length of the urethral canal and thus rendering sexual intercourse impossible. According to some authorities it is hatred of the white man and dread of slavery which are the reasons of this racial suicide. Among the Dyaks and in many of the Melanesian islands curious modes of ornamentation of the organs (such as the kalang) prevail, which are in the nature of mutilations.
Penal Use.—Mutilation as a method of punishment was common in the criminal law of many ancient nations. In the earliest laws of England mutilation, maiming and dismemberment had a prominent place. “Men branded on the forehead, without hands, feet, or tongues, lived as examples of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes and as a warning to all churls” (Pike’s History of Crime in England, 1873). The Danes were more severe than the Saxons. Under their rules eyes were plucked out; noses, ears and upper lips cut off; scalps torn away; and sometimes the whole body flayed alive. The earliest forest-laws of which there is record are those of Canute (1016). Under these, if a freedman offered violence to a keeper of the king’s deer he was liable to lose freedom and property; if a serf, he lost his right hand, and on a second offence was to die. One who killed a deer was either to have his eyes put out or lose his life. Under the first two Norman kings mutilation was the punishment for poaching. It was, however, not reserved for that, as during the reign of Henry I. some coiners were taken to Winchester, where their right hands were lopped off and they were castrated. Under the kings of the West Saxon dynasty the loss of hands had been a common penalty for coining (The Obsolete Punishments of Shropshire, by S. Meeson Morris). Morris quotes a case in John’s reign at the Salop Assizes in 1203, where one Alice Crithecreche and others were accused of murdering an old woman at Lilleshall. Convicted of being accessory, Crithecreche was sentenced to death, but the penalty was altered to that of having her eyes plucked out. During the Tudor and Stuart periods mutilations were a common form of punishment extra-judicially inflicted by order of the privy council and the Star Chamber. There are said to be preserved at Playford Hall, Ipswich, instruments of Henry VIII.’s time for cutting off ears. This penalty appears to have been inflicted for not attending church. By an act of Henry VIII. (33 Hen. VIII. c. 12) the punishment for “striking in the king’s court or house” was the loss of the right hand. For writing a tract on The Monstrous Regimen of Women a Nonconformist divine (Dr W. Stubbs) had his right hand lopped off. Among many cases of severe mutilations during Stuart times may be mentioned those of Prynne, Burton, Bastwick and Titus Oates.
MUTINY (from an old verb “mutine,” O. Fr. mutin, meutin, a sedition; cf. mod. Fr. émeute; the original is the Late Lat. mota, commotion, from movere, to move), a resistance by force to recognized authority, an insurrection, especially applied to a sedition in any military or naval forces of the state. Such offences are dealt with by courts-martial. (See Military Law and Court Martial.)
MUTSU, MUNEMITSU, Count (1842–1896), Japanese statesman, was born in 1842 in Wakayama. A vehement opponent of “clan government”—that is, usurpation of administrative posts by men of two or three fiefs, an abuse which threatened to follow the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate—he conspired to assist Saigo’s rebellion and was imprisoned from 1878 until 1883. While in prison he translated Bentham’s Utilitarianism. In 1886, after a visit to Europe, he received a diplomatic appointment, and held the portfolio of foreign affairs during the China-Japan War (1894–95), being associated with Prince (then Count) Ito as peace plenipotentiary. He negotiated the first of the revised treaties (that with Great Britain), and for these various services he received the title of count. He died in Tōkyō in 1896. His statue in bronze stands before the foreign office in Tōkyō.
MUTSU HITO, Mikado, or Emperor, of Japan (1852–), was born on the 3rd of November 1852, succeeded his father, Osahito, the former emperor, in January 1867, and was crowned at Osaka on the 31st of October 1868. The country was then in a ferment owing to the concessions which had been granted to foreigners by the preceding shōgun Iyemochi, who in 1854 concluded a treaty with Commodore Perry by which it was agreed that certain ports should be open to foreign trade. This convention gave great offence to the more conservative daimios, and on their initiative the mikado suddenly decided to abolish the shogunate. This resolution was not carried out without strong opposition. The reigning shōgun, Keiki, yielded to the decree, but many of his followers were not so complaisant, and it was only by force of arms that the new order of things was imposed on the country. The main object of those who had advocated the change was to lead to a reversion to the
