victorious party, in the bitterness of their contempt and hatred, employing the skin of a slain enemy in a somewhat similar manner. Hugh Cressingham, appointed by Edward I. Lord Chief Justice of Scotland, having been slain at Stirling Bridge in an attack by Wallace, the Scots flayed him, and made saddles and girths of his skin. To recur to the practices of a higher state of civilization, our own custom, which existed as late as the last century, of exposing the heads of traitors, although meant as a warning, in the same way as hanging in chains, was perhaps a relic of those ferocious ages when it was not considered mean and brutal to carry revenge beyond the grave. The executions in London, after the rebellion of 1745, were followed by such a revolting display, useless for any object of salutary terror, and calculated only to excite a vulgar curiosity. Horace Walpole, in a very few words, describes the feelings with which the public crowded to this sight:—“I have been this morning at the Tower, and passed under the new heads of Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spying glasses at a halfpenny a look. ” The New Zealanders have, therefore, in some degree, a justification for this custom in the somewhat similar acts of civilized communities. At any rate, in preserving, as they do, the heads of their enemies, they only follow a practice which has been common to many other barbarous tribes.