_Santos_[13] (1586) remarks: “The people bewail their dead by dint of drumming, and desist from leaping and dancing only when fatigue obliges them to cease (33). They regard their king as the favourite of the souls of the dead, and think that he learns from them all that passes in his dominions (1). The Portuguese delivered from their dreadful slavery a number of women and children whom this wretch kept with a number of men in pens for the purpose of killing and eating them in succession (79, 106). They acknowledge a God who, both in this world and in the world to come, measures retribution for the good or evil done in this.” [This looks, I fear, somewhat like reading our ideas into their language. Still, natives might easily fancy that the old chief to whom they go at death will treat his subjects much as he did in this life.] The Rev. H. Rowley, of the Magomero Mission, gives an account of a public supplication for rain amongst the Anyasa (20). In conducting war, “The Yao,” he says, “left their camp before daybreak, marched direct to the principal village, destroyed that, and fired the others which lay in their line of march home. The difficulty was to get messengers to the Yao.... When we asked our own men to be the messengers, they put their hands instinctively to their throats” (101). In a case of accidental death “it was difficult to convince one party that it was an accident, and both that witchcraft had nothing to do with it” (86). SOUTH AFRICA. The Zulu and Kafir have customs so similar to the Yao that I refer only to a few, some of which are quoted on account of the difference. They do not eat fowls, ducks, or eggs, lest they should be barren (D). They conceal birth-names (52). A man must not see the face of his mother-in-law. The eldest son succeeds his father. They bury in a circular hole, placing the body in a sitting posture. On returning from a funeral they get a charm administered to them. A spirit may come back as a snake (5). Their Witch-doctors and Fetishmen are more set apart from the people than those in Eastern Central Africa. Feathers, claws, teeth, pieces of wood, &c., are charms. Prophets smell a person to see whether he speaks the truth. The witch is believed not to eat the body taken from the grave, but to use it as a charm. A recent account of one of the southern Bantu tribes, the _Amandebele_, which was formed of 30 or 40 smaller tribes, is given by Thomas, from which we take the following customs:—