Outside the Spanish Islands, Negroes are the dominant race in the West Indies. In regions where they have not been replaced by Hindus, as they have been in Trinidad and Demerara, British Guiana, they constitute 90 per cent of the population. They are, in fact, the only people who regard themselves as natives. The Asiatics and the Europeans are, for the most part, mere sojourners. So far as the islands now have a native culture it is the culture of the Negro folk. It is, at the same time, the most characteristic manifestation of the mentality of the West Indian black man, so far as he has preserved what Lévy-Bruhl describes as the mentality of primitive man. What is more interesting about obeah is that while as a practice and a belief it is universal among the uneducated classes of the black population in the islands, it is everywhere different, and everywhere in process of change. Practices that were originally imported from Africa tend to assimilate and fuse with related practices and traits of the European and Hindu cultures wherever the Africans have come into contact with them. This is evident, in the first place, from the fact that the obeah man is not always a Negro; he may be, and not infrequently is, a Hindu. In the second place, the ritual of obeah may include anything from patent medicine to Guinea pepper. Among the instruments of obeah in the possession of the police of Trinidad recently were a stone image, evidently of Hindu origin, and a book of magic ritual published in Chicago, which pretended to be, and no doubt had been, translated originally from the writings of Albertus Magnus, the great medieval writer on magic. A book called _Le Petit Albert_ is said to be extremely popular among obeah men in the French Islands. The favorite decoctions in use among witch doctors consist of bones, ashes, “grave dirt,” human nail parings—mixed, perhaps, with asafetida or any other substance having a pungent odor. But in addition to these, obeah men in the West Indies use the candles, the little shrines, or “chapels,” as they call them, and various other portions of the ritual of the Catholic church. In January, 1917, a woman known as Valentine Sims, a native of St. Lucia, was convicted, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, of obtaining money by the assumption of supernatural powers. The testimony in the case showed that, among other things, she attended the Roman Catholic church, and, on pretense of receiving holy communion, took the altar bread distributed to the worshipers during the communion, and used it in practicing obeah.