_Obeah_—which is Negro witchcraft, and whose worst aspect was the poisonous _idea_ put into the mind of the subject—has gone under to a great extent. Extraordinary cases of it crop up now and again in the newspapers. It is the most difficult of all anthropological data on which to “draw” the old Negro. Burton gives an Old Calabar proverb: “Ubio nkpo ono onya” (They plant Obeah for him) and adds this note: “‘Ubio’ means any medicine or charm put in the ground to cause sickness or death. It is manifestly the origin of the West Indian ‘obeah.’ We shall be the less surprised to hear that the word has traveled so far when told by Clarkson, in his _History of the Slave Trade_, that when the traffic was a legitimate branch of commerce as many slaves were annually exported from Bonny and the Old Calabar River as from all the rest of the West African Coast.”[63] Obeah is Negro magic. The paper which follows was suggested by observation on Negro magic during a recent visit to the English Islands in the Caribbean. During the past year two very important books have been published, in English, dealing with the subject of magic. The first is a translation of Lévy-Bruhl’s _La Mentalité Primitive_, and the other is Lynn Thorndyke’s _A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of the Christian Era_. In venturing to include two volumes so different in content and point of view in the same general category, I have justified myself by adopting Thorndyke’s broad definition, which includes under “magic” “all occult arts and sciences, superstition and folklore.” Lévy-Bruhl’s book is an attempt, from a wide survey of anthropological literature, to define a mode of thought characteristic of primitive peoples. Thorndyke, on the other hand, is interested mainly, as the title of his volume indicates, in the beginnings of empirical science. The points of view are different, but the subject matter is the same, namely, magical beliefs and practices, particularly in so far as they reflect and embody a specific type of thought. Lévy-Bruhl has collected, mainly from the writings of missionaries and travelers, an imposing number of widely scattered observations. These have been classified and interpreted in a way that is intended to demonstrate that the mental life and habits of thought of primitive peoples differ fundamentally from those of civilized man. Thorndyke, on the other hand, has described the circumstances under which, during the first thirteen centuries of our era, the forerunners of modern science were gradually discarding magical practices in favor of scientific experiment.