affirmed, we may perhaps assume that such a birth-tree is supposed to stand in a sympathetic relation with the life of the person. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of a tree.(438) The chief of Old Town in Calabar kept his soul in a sacred grove near a spring of water. When some Europeans, in frolic or ignorance, cut down part of the grove, the spirit was most indignant and threatened the perpetrators of the deed, according to the king, with all manner of evil.(439) Among the Fans of the French Congo, when a chief’s son is born, the remains of the navel-string are buried under a sacred fig-tree, and “thenceforth great importance is attached to the growth of the tree; it is strictly forbidden to touch it. Any attempt on the tree would be considered as an attack on the human being himself.”(440) Among the Boloki of the Upper Congo a family has a plant with red leaves (called _nkungu_) for its totem. When a woman of the family is with child for the first time, one of the totemic plants is planted near the hearth outside the house and is never destroyed, otherwise it is believed that the child would be born thin and weak and would remain puny and sickly. “The healthy life of the children and family is bound up with the healthiness and life of the totem tree as respected and preserved by the family.”(441) Among the Baganda of Central Africa a child’s afterbirth was called the second child and was believed to be animated by a spirit, which at once became a ghost. The afterbirth was usually buried at the root of a banana tree, and afterwards the tree was carefully guarded by old women, who prevented any one from going near it; they tied ropes of fibre from tree to tree to isolate it, and all the child’s excretions were thrown into this enclosure. When the fruit ripened, it was cut by the old woman in charge. The reason for guarding the tree thus carefully was a belief that if any stranger were to eat of the fruit of the tree or to drink beer brewed from it, he would carry off with him the ghost of the child’s afterbirth, which had been buried at the root of the banana-tree, and the living child would then die in order to follow its twin ghost. Whereas a grandparent of the child, by eating the fruit or drinking the beer, averted this catastrophe and ensured the health of the child.(442) Among the Wakondyo, at the north-western corner of Lake Albert Nyanza, it is customary to bury the afterbirth at the foot of a young banana-tree, and the fruit of this particular tree may be eaten by no one but the woman who assisted at the birth.(443) The reason for the custom is not mentioned, but probably, as among the Baganda, the life of the child is supposed to be bound up with the life of the tree, since the afterbirth, regarded as a spiritual double of the infant, has been buried at the root of the tree.