This connects the fetish with the guardian spirits of the North American Indians, which appear to young men in dreams, or visions, after prayer and fasting. The vision generally takes the form of some tangible object, often an animal, a portion of which is preserved by the man as his most precious possession, and if not, some concrete form is taken to represent the subject of the vision. A guardian spirit differs, however, from a fetish, in that it is a life-long possession, some men are not privileged to obtain one, and no man could possess more than one; while any man could obtain a fetish, and could discard one and adopt another if it proved to be unavailing. 2. It consists of a =symbolic charm with sympathetic properties=. ‘There is a relation between the selected substances and the object to be obtained: to give the possessor bravery or strength, some part of a leopard or an elephant; to give cunning, some part of a gazelle; to give wisdom, some part of a human brain; to give courage, some part of a heart; to give influence, some part of an eye,’ etc. etc. ‘These substances are supposed to lure some spirit (being in some way pleasing to it) which thenceforward is satisfied to reside in them and to aid the possessor in the accomplishment of some specific wish’ (53, 82). For convenience of carriage these substances are put into snail-shells, nut-shells, or the small horns of gazelles, or of goats, and the whole then forms the fetish. Bosman describes the way in which a fetish, consisting of a pipe filled with various substances, was generally made on the Guinea Coast in 1705. ‘They have a great wooden pipe filled with earth, oil, blood, bones of dead men and beasts, feathers, hair, and to be short, all sorts of excrementitious and filthy trash, which they do not endeavour to mould into any shape, but lay it in a confused heap in the pipe’ (54, xvi. 398). ‘Human eyeballs, particularly of white men, are a great charm. This, I fancy, is to secure the man “that lives in your eyes” for the service of the village’ (40, 305). Sometimes there is a tangible connection between the object chosen for the fetish and the spirit occupying it. Thus among the Gold Coast natives the object which is entered by the subordinate spirit of Sasabonsum must be taken from the habitat of a Sasabonsum, from a place, that is, which is marked with red earth, where the red earth marks the blood of the victim of a Sasabonsum (15, 109).