Sitting one day by a village boat-landing in the Benita region, about 1866, while my crew prepared for our journey, I was idly plucking at my beard, and carelessly flung away a few hairs. Presently I observed that some children gathered them up. Asking my Christian assistant what that meant, he told me: "They will have a fetich made with those hairs; when next you visit this village, they will ask you for some favor, and you will grant it, by the power they will thus have obtained over you." The water with which a lover's body (male or female) is washed, is used in making a philter to be mingled secretly in the drink of the loved one. While, as I have already stated, it is true that anything portable may be used either as the receptacle in which the spirit is to be located or as the substance or "medicine" to be inserted in it, I wish to insist that in the philosophy of fetich there is always a reason in the selection of all these articles,--a reason which it is often difficult for a foreigner to discover,--an apparent fitness for the end in view. Arnot[31] refers to this: "Africans believe largely in preventive measures, and their fetich charms are chiefly of that order. In passing through a country where leopards and lions abound, they carefully provide themselves with the claws, teeth, lips, and whiskers of those animals, and hang them around their necks, to secure themselves against being attacked. For the same purpose the point of an elephant trunk is generally worn by elephant hunters. The bones from the legs of tortoises are much valued as anklets, in order to give the wearers endurance, reminding one of the fable of the tortoise. The lower jaw-bone of the tortoise is worn by certain tribes as a preventive against toothache. The spine bones of serpents are strung together with a girdle as a cure for back-ache." A recent visitor to the Gabun country, in the "Journal of the African Society," makes this criticism: "When a white man or woman wears some trinket strung about them, they call it an amulet or charm. They ascribe to it some virtue, and regard it as a sacred (?) thing; but when an African native wears one, white men call it 'fetich,' and the wearer a savage or heathen." This defence of the Negro is gratifying, but the criticism of the white man is not quite just. There is this radical difference: to the African the "fetich" is his all, his entire hope for his physical salvation; he does not reckon on God at all. The civilized man or woman with a "mascot" is very foolish in his or her belief in luck, but their mascots never entirely take God's place.