work upon their countrymen principally through their mystic exorcisms and _seances_, which occur as a rule in the winter, when they are living in houses. The lamps are extinguished, and skins hung before the windows. The angekok himself sits upon the floor. By dint of making a horrible noise so that the whole house shakes, changing his voice, bellowing and shrieking, ventriloquising, groaning, moaning, and whining, beating on drums, bursting forth into diabolical shrieks of laughter and all sorts of other tricks, he persuades his companions that he is visited by the various spirits he personates, and that it is they who make the disturbance." They cure diseases by reciting charms, and "give men a new soul." He demands large fees, not for himself, he explains, but for the spirits whose agent he is. Apparently these spirits have similar ideas to the London consulting physician. Mr. Theodore Bent, in his "Ruined Cities of Mashonaland," gives a specimen of the credulity excited by the medicine-men. The explorer desired to interview a chief, Mtoko by name, but permission was refused. The reason, he afterwards ascertained, was that the chief's father had died shortly after another white man's visit, and the common belief was that he had been bewitched. The chief thought that the "white lady" who ruled over the nation to which Mr. Bent belonged had sent him purposely to cast a glamour over him. It may be remembered that the ill-fated Lobengula refused to have his portrait taken because he believed that by means of the image of himself he could be magically infected with a dread disease. This idea of substitution, which has already been referred to, is akin to that of the belief in witchcraft during the middle ages--namely, that the witches could, by sticking pins into the wax image of a person, bring upon that person agonising maladies. The dreadful results of such beliefs among savage tribes is told by the two hospital nurses who a year or so ago produced a lively book, "Adventures in Mashonaland." One morning a native entered their camp, bringing a tale of horror. A chief called Maronka, whose kraal was about forty miles away, had boiled his family alive. He had been convinced by the native doctors that after death the souls of the chiefs passed into the bodies of lions. His medicine-men had "smelt out" his own family as witches, and boiling alive was the requisite punishment. Mr. Rider Haggard has told many such stories as this in his books on South Africa. The Zulu doctors were in the habit, not only of "smelling out" witches and evil spirits, but of sprinkling the soldiers with medicine, in order to "put a great heart into them," and ensure their victory in battle.