nor comb his hair, so it is always long and tangled.[1] Amongst the Alfoers of Celebes the Leleen or priest who looks after the rice-fields may not cut his hair during the time that he exercises his special functions, that is, from a month before the rice is sown until it is housed.[2] In Ceram men do not cut their hair: if married men did so, they would lose their wives; if young men did so, they would grow weak and enervated.[3] In Timorlaut, married men may not cut their hair for the same reason as in Ceram, but widowers and men on a journey may do so after offering a fowl or a pig in sacrifice.[4] Here men on a journey are specially permitted to cut their hair; but elsewhere men travelling abroad have been in the habit of leaving their hair uncut until their return. The reason for the latter custom is probably the danger to which, as we have seen, a traveller is believed to be exposed from the magic arts of the strangers amongst whom he sojourns; if they got possession of his shorn hair, they might work his destruction through it. The Egyptians on a journey kept their hair uncut till they returned home.[5] “At Taif when a man returned from a journey his first duty was to visit the Rabba and poll his hair.”[6] The custom of keeping the hair unshorn during a dangerous expedition seems to have been observed, at least occasionally, by the Romans.[7] Achilles kept unshorn his yellow hair,
- ↑ G. M. Dawson “On the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands,” in Geological Survey of Canada, Report of Progress for 1878-79, p. 123 B.
- ↑ P. N. Wilken, “Bijdragen tot de kennis van de zeden en gewoonten der Alfoeren in de Minahassa,” in Mededeelingen van wege het Ncderlandsche Zendelinggenootschap, vii. (1863) p. 126.
- ↑ Riedel, De sluik-en kroesharige rassen tusschen Selebes en Papua, p. 137.
- ↑ Riedel, op. cit. p. 292 sq.
- ↑ Diodorus Siculus, i. 18.
- ↑ W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, p. 152 sq.
- ↑ Valerius Flaccus, Argonaut, i. 378 sq.:—
“Tectus et Eurytion servato colla capillo,
Quem pater Aonias reducem tondebit ad aras.”
