A little later than this, Stanley, or Tandelay, or Bula Matari, as the natives called him, was at Bumba, and there again he exchanged blood in friendship. “Myombi, the chief,” he says, “was easily persuaded by Yumbila to make blood-brotherhood with me; and for the fiftieth time my poor arm was scarified, and my blood shed for the cause of civilization. Probably one thousand people of both sexes looked on the scene, wonderingly and strangely. A young branch of a palm was cut, twisted, and a knot tied at each end; the knots were dipped in wood ashes, and then seized and held by each of us, while the medicine-man practised his blood-letting art, and lanced us both, until Myombi winced with pain; after which the knotted branch was severed; and, in some incomprehensible manner, I had become united forever to my fiftieth brother; to whom I was under the obligation of defending [him] against all foes until death.”[60] The blood of a fair proportion of all the first families of Equatorial Africa now courses in Stanley’s veins; and if ever there was an American citizen who could appropriate to himself preeminently the national motto, “E pluribus unum,” Stanley is the man. The root-idea of this rite of blood-friendship seems to include the belief, that the blood is the life of a living being; not merely that the blood is _essential_ to life, but that, in a peculiar sense, it _is_ life; that it actually vivifies by its presence; and that by its passing from one organism to another it carries and imparts life. The inter-commingling of the blood of two organisms is, therefore, according to this view, equivalent to the inter-commingling of the lives, of the personalities, of the natures, thus brought together; so that there is, thereby and thenceforward, one life in the two bodies, a common life between the two friends: a thought which Aristotle recognizes in his citation of the ancient “proverb”: “One soul [in two bodies],”[61] a proverb which has not lost its currency in any of the centuries. That the blood can retain its vivifying power whether passing into another by way of the lips or by way of the veins, is, on the face of it, no less plausible, than that the administering of stimulants, tonics, nutriments, nervines, or anæsthetics, hypodermically, may be equally potent, in certain cases, with the more common and normal method of seeking assimilation by the process of digestion. That the blood of the living has a peculiar vivifying force, in its transference from one organism to another, is one of the clearly proven re-disclosures of modern medical science; and this transference of blood has been made to advantage by way of the veins, of the stomach, of the intestines, of the tissue, and even of the lungs--through dry-spraying.[62] 4. TRACES OF THE RITE IN EUROPE.[63]