trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort,
sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement,
brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and
folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals
are arranged.

Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation
ceremonies involve circumcision and urethral subincision, as well
as hard manual labor and hardships. The initiation of girls into
womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the vagina. These
ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (_Northern
Tribes of Central Australia_, Ch. XI). Among various peoples in
British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is
a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months,
and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls
clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the
nymphae. A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is
disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement. When
the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is
marriageable (C. Marsh Beadnell, "Circumcision and Clitoridectomy
as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," _British
Medical Journal_, April 29, 1905).

Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a
missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and
discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the
tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and
endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2)
In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex
separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that
of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by
night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does
not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults,
with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E.
Gottschling, "The Bawenda," _Journal Anthropological
Institution_, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372. Cf., an interesting
account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary,
Wessmann, _The Bawenda_, pp. 60 et seq.).

The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been
fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The
Chensamwali' or Ini