Among the charms practiced to prevent sickness from visiting a kraal is the “Umkuba” or custom of the girls herding the cattle for a day. No special season of the year is chosen for this custom. It is merely enacted when diseases are known to be prevalent. On such an occasion, all the girls and unmarried women of a kraal rise early in the morning, dress themselves entirely in their brothers’ or men’s skins, and taking their “knobkerries” and sticks, open the cattle pen or kraal, and drive the cattle away from the vicinity of the homestead, none of these soidisant herds returning home until sunset, when they bring the cattle back. No one of the opposite sex dares go near the girls on this day, or speak to them. Seriously deformed children are left in the open veldt with the hope that the spirits, who bewitched them will relent and either cure them or take them away. Usually carnivora manage the latter alternative. The method of doctoring children though curious is on the whole rational. When the child is sick, emetics or purgatives are used. If the former, the usual way of laying the child on its back and holding its nose is adopted. If the latter, a decoction is prepared, a short piece of small reed is obtained. The mother takes the liquor into her mouth and inserting one end of the reed into the child’s fundament, blows the mixture into the bowels giving the picanini what she thinks sufficient. The Placenta is burned, with the lochia mixed with cowdung, and as far as I can find out there is no superstition attached to its disposal such as exists in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland. The infant is first rolled in a fresh goat skin and no special treatment of the navel adopted. Mother’s Milk. Deficiency is almost unknown, but a foster mother is usually ready to supply the needful in such a case. When the infant dies, or is still-born, the breasts are emptied by the mother or an older child and allowed to dry up as soon as possible. No herbs are used specially for that purpose. Pregnancies. Dr. Casalis gives some useful statistics on this subject amongst the Basutos. 100 women, chosen hap-hazard, had 490 children, 215 boys, 275 girls, of which 330 were alive and 160 dead. Of the 100 women, 30 had from 8–9 children; 62 had from 3–6; and 7 from 1–2. Six had twins, and only one was sterile, but as many as 45 had aborted at one time or another during her child-bearing period. And he remarks “The relative frequency of girls to boys is not abnormal; nor is the number of pregnancies unusually large, in fact one would expect a larger amongst savages, were it not for the fact that here a mother suckles her babe for two years, and so usually avoids pregnancy for that period. The Sesuto have a proverb, ‘Many babes spoil the womb.’” Sterility, is extremely rare and a great disgrace to Mosuto woman, who will do anything rather than be considered sterile.