The Mang’anja, like the Mashona and other Makalanga tribes, have been distinguished from time immemorial as workers in iron. The Zulus do not appear to have practised this art to any great extent, though it was handed down in certain families, who probably learnt it from the Makalanga. It is not common among the Baronga, and M. Junod, in giving a woodcut of a knife in a carved sheath (of the kind very common on the Zambezi and elsewhere), which he obtained from a travelled native, remarks that it is ‘pièce rare et qu’on m’a dit provenir de la tribu des Bandjao’—a distant tribe in the north-west; it is quite possible that this was really a Mashona knife. The Zulus do not appear to have a distinct word for a knife, either calling it _umkonto_ (a weapon, or tool in general), or using the Dutch word _mes_. Livingstone, when first visiting the Shiré Highlands in 1859, found that ‘Iron ore is dug out of the hills, and its manufacture is the staple trade of the southern highlands. Each village has its smelting-house, its charcoal-burners and blacksmiths. They make good axes, spears, needles, arrow-heads, bracelets, and anklets, which are sold at surprisingly low rates; a hoe over two pounds in weight is exchanged for calico of about the value of fourpence.’ In 1876 there was a smelting-furnace within a few hundred yards of Blantyre station, and ‘a smithy in an old hut beside the station was daily patronised.’ The furnaces have mostly disappeared, and the smiths do not often make hoes or axes, preferring to hammer scraps of imported iron—for instance, pieces of the hoops from packing-cases—into small knives or the like. I made a rough sketch of the smithy beside the _bwalo_ at Ntumbi; it was in a very dilapidated condition, and I never saw the smith at work there, though he sold me a small razor of his own manufacture, which is now in the Ethnological Museum at Cambridge. The forge contained the usual fireplace, with a ridge of earth banked up round it, rather higher than the ordinary fireplace in a hut. On the further side of the hollow were two upright clay-pipes, into which the two openings of the goat-skin bellows were fixed when at work; they communicated below with another pipe opening into the midst of the embers. A split bamboo is used as tongs, and the smith keeps a pot of water beside him to quench the ends when they take fire. The anvil is a flat stone, and a large stone is used as the forge-hammer; iron hammers are used in later stages of the process. The characteristic Nyanja knife is two-edged, with carved wooden handle and sheath, as shown in the illustration. The one shown in the illustration is not a very elaborate specimen, but they are sometimes beautifully carved, and of all sizes, from six inches and under to about a foot, but the tiny ones sometimes seen are only made for sale to travellers as curios, on the Lower Shiré and Zambezi. These knives serve every possible