to the king to avert the avenging furies of evil spirits of the murdered pair, which might otherwise have hounded him into a fit of madness.”(496) By drinking the ashes of his victims the king sought to identify himself with them and so to protect himself against their angry ghosts, just as we have seen that manslayers seek to protect themselves against the ghosts of their victims by drinking their blood.(497) (M124) Just as the savage thinks that he can swallow the moral and other virtues in the shape of food, so he fondly imagines that he can inoculate himself with them. Here in Europe we as yet inoculate only against disease; in Basutoland they have learned the art of inoculating not merely against disease but against moral evil and public calamity, against wild beasts and winter cold. For example, if an epidemic is raging, if public affairs go ill, or war threatens to break out, the chief, with paternal solicitude, seeks to guard his people against the evils that menace them by inoculating them with his own hand. Armed with a lancet, he makes a slight incision in the temples of each one, and rubs into the wound a pinch of magic powder which has been carefully compounded of the ashes of certain plants and animals. The plants and animals whose ashes compose this sovereign medicine are always symbolical; in other words, they are supposed to be imbued with the virtues which the chief desires to impart to his people. They consist, for example, of plants whose foliage withstands the rigours of winter; mimosas, whose thorns present an impenetrable barrier to all animals of the deer kind; the claws or a few hairs from the mane of a lion, the bravest of beasts; the tuft of hair round the root of the horns of a bull, which is the emblem of strength and fecundity; the skin of a serpent; the feathers of a kite or a hawk.(498) So when the Barotsé wish to be swift of foot, to cripple the fleeing game, and to ensure an abundant catch, they scarify their arms and legs and rub into the wounds a powder made of the burnt bones of various beasts and birds.(499) Among some tribes of South-Eastern Africa the same magic powder which is made from various parts of slain foes, and is eaten by boys at circumcision,(500) is used to inoculate the fighting-men in time of war. The medicine-man makes an incision in the forehead of each warrior, and puts the powder into the cut, thus infusing strength and courage for the battle.(501) Among some Caffre tribes the powdered charcoal with which the warriors are thus inoculated in various parts of their bodies is procured by burning the flesh of a live ox with a certain kind of wood or roots, to which magic virtue is attributed.(502) The Basutos think that they can render themselves invulnerable by inoculation,(503) and the Zulus imagine that they can protect themselves against snake-bite by similar means. But the saving virtue of the inoculation is not permanent; like vaccination, it has to be periodically renewed.