affairs and have not yet had relations with men. We put the medicine in the horns of oxen, and these children go to all the fords, to all the entrances of the country. A little girl turns up the soil with her mattock, the others dip a branch in the horn and sprinkle the inside of the hole saying, ‘Rain! rain!’ So we remove the misfortune which the women have brought on the roads; the rain will be able to come. The country is purified!”(540) (M97) Similarly the Ba-Thonga, another Bantu tribe of South Africa in the valley of the Limpopo river, attribute severe droughts to the concealment of miscarriages by women, and they perform the following rites to remove the pollution and procure rain. A small clearing is made in a thick and thorny wood, and here a pot is buried in the ground so that its mouth is flush with the surface. From the pot four channels run in the form of a cross to the four cardinal points of the horizon. Then a black ox or a black ram, without a speck of white on it, is killed and the pot is stuffed with the half-digested grass found in the animal’s stomach. Next, little girls, still in the age of innocence, are sent to draw water, which they pour into the pot till it overflows into the four channels. After that the women assemble, strip off their clothes, and covering their nakedness only with a scanty petticoat of grass they dance, leap, and sing, “Rain, fall!” Then they go and dig up the remains of the prematurely born infants and of twins buried in dry ground on a hill. These they collect in one place. No man may approach the spot. The women would beat any male who might be so indiscreet as to intrude on their privacy, and they would put riddles to him which he would have to answer in the most filthy language borrowed from the circumcision ceremonies; for obscene words, which are usually forbidden, are customary and legitimate on these occasions. The women pour water on the graves of the infants and of twins in order to “extinguish” (_timula_) them, as the natives phrase it; which seems to imply that the graves are thought to be the source of the scorching heat which is blasting the country. At the fall of evening they bury all the remains they have discovered, poking them away in the mud near a stream. Then the rain will be free to fall.(541) In these ceremonies the pouring of water into channels which run in the direction of the four quarters of the heaven is clearly a charm based on the principles of homoeopathic magic to procure rain. The supposed influence of twins over the waters of heaven and the use of foul language at rain-making ceremonies have been illustrated in another part of this work.(542)