Among the worst of the African pests is the _jigger_. Those who are most sensitive to it would without doubt call it the worst of all. If the pest of the small ant travels from the interior towards the coast, this pest began at the coast and is extending towards the interior. It has evidently been imported—tradition says from Brazil, in the cargo and sand ballast of sailing vessels. The older inhabitants along the coast remember when it first became known, and I am sure that it made itself known very soon after it arrived. The jigger is a tiny species of flea, so small that the naked eye sees it with difficulty. It has all the reprehensible habits of its kind. The males hop all over one’s person in a playful manner, giving him a nip here and a nip there; but the females burrow beneath the skin. The favourite place is the feet, especially under the nails, but they are frequently found also under the finger nails and sometimes in the elbows and knees. Here the female, unless discovered and removed, forms a sac which expands to the size of a small pea, and which contains hundreds of little jiggers who soon begin to “jig” for themselves, and burrow again in the same flesh. Many of them however are scattered on the ground; those that remain keep multiplying, until if neglected the whole foot becomes a festering sore. To the African child the jigger is the occasion of its worst suffering. I have seen children who could not walk, some with toes eaten away, and several with nearly the whole foot gone. For, to the African and to some white men, they are not irritating while boring beneath the skin, and afterwards they are very hard to see, especially in the black skin of the native. One may know nothing of their presence for several days, after which they are so hard to remove that the native child will bear the irritating itch that they first occasion rather than submit to the pain of removing them; and when the itch has become a painful sore, no child could remove them. Some African mothers watch their children’s feet closely but others neglect them cruelly. I am glad to say that those who allow their feet to get full of jiggers, or mothers who neglect the care of their children’s feet, are looked down upon, as lousy persons would be among us, though not to the same extent.