whatever has once been in contact with a person remains in sympathetic connexion with him always, and harm done to it is therefore harm done to him. Side by side with the evil which this superstition produces, on the one hand by inspiring men with baseless terrors, and on the other by leading them to neglect effectual remedies for real evils, we must recognise the benefit which it incidentally confers on society by causing people to clear away and destroy the refuse of their food and other rubbish, which if suffered to accumulate about their dwellings might, by polluting the atmosphere, prove a real, not an imaginary source of disease. In practice, cleanliness based on motives of superstition may be just as effective for the preservation of health as if it were founded on the best-ascertained principles of sanitary science.​[1215] [Sidenote: Evolution of chiefs or kings out of magicians, especially out of rain-makers, in Africa. Power of magicians among the Wambugwe, Wataturu, and Wagogo of East Africa. Among the Masai the supreme chief is always a powerful medicine-man.] Still rising in the scale of culture we come to Africa, where both the chieftainship and the kingship are fully developed; and here the evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the magician, and especially out of the rain-maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa, the original form of government was a family republic, but the enormous power of the sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised them to the rank of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living in the country in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians, and the wealth of cattle they possessed came to them almost wholly in the shape of presents bestowed for their services in that capacity. Their principal art was that of rain-making.​[1216] The chiefs of the Wataturu, another {p343} people of East Africa, are said to be nothing but sorcerers destitute of any direct political influence.​[1217] Again, among the Wagogo of German East Africa the main power of the chiefs, we are told, is derived from their art of rain-making. If a chief cannot make rain himself, he must procure it from some one who can.​[1218] Again, in the powerful Masai nation of the same region the medicine-men are not uncommonly the chiefs, and the supreme chief of the race is almost invariably a powerful medicine-man. These _Laibon_, as they are called, are priests as well as doctors, skilled in interpreting omens and dreams, in averting ill-luck, and in making rain.​[1219] The head chief or medicine-man, who has been called the Masai pope,​[1220] is expected not only to make rain, but to repel and destroy the enemies of the Masai in war by his magic art.​[1221] The following is Captain Merker’s account of the Masai pope: “The most prominent clan of the whole Masai people is the _En gidon_, because to it belong not only the family of the chief (_ol oiboni_), but also the family of the