The characteristic snakes, especially the deadly vipers which abound, are of bright and variegated colours, green, red, yellow and black. Some call them beautiful, but in most of us the association of ideas makes it impossible for us to see any beauty in a snake. Their colours are the very colours of nature around them; and therefore, instead of making them conspicuous, are really an approximation to invisibility—though I believe that the protective colouration of animals, as a principle, has been exaggerated. A recent traveller says that in crossing the entire continent of Africa he saw only two snakes, and he adds that since he succeeded in killing both of them there are now no snakes in Africa, so far as he knows. I am reminded of a vivid experience when an American friend, Mr. Northam, stayed some months in Gaboon and collected biological specimens. Mr. Northam asked me whether there were many snakes around Gaboon. I told him that there were very few. At his suggestion I told my schoolboys that he wished to collect snakes and would give them something for all the valuable snakes they would bring to him. The immediate result was enough to make a man think that he had been suddenly precipitated into a state of delirium tremens. I had not supposed that there were so many snakes in all Africa. A continual procession of boys passed my door, each with some horrible kind of snake dangling from a stick, or dragging along the ground. And I had said there were but few snakes in Gaboon! The explanation is that I kept to the paths while abroad, and snakes are seldom found in the paths in the daytime; for they are mostly nocturnal in their habits, and I was not. But the boys know where to find them at any time. After all, life in Africa is quite tolerable. As I think back over this formidable array of pests, I am somewhat surprised that I was not more conscious of them while in Africa, and that I had leisure to do anything else but fight them. The explanation is that, although one is fighting some of them all the time, one is never fighting them all at the same time. VII THE “CANNIBAL” FANG “The Mpongwe have plenty of salt in them,” said one of my boat-boys. He was a Fang, and he was speaking of the coast tribe.