The notion of a connection between religion and morality comes comparatively late in human development; but we can perhaps see traces of it in the idea of the _chirope_. This means that, when a man has killed another man, he will either be ill, or be seized by a sort of murderous madness till he has performed some expiatory ceremony. The accounts I have before me are somewhat different, but are not, perhaps, inconsistent with one another. Among the Yaos, in Macdonald’s time, it seems to have been a condition that the victim should not be an enemy (towards whom no obligations were recognised), or even a person of the same tribe, whose kinsfolk could take up the feud and demand compensation. But, if a Yao killed his own slave (or, apparently, his child, his younger brother, or any one under his charge), he feared that he ‘would pine away, lose his eyesight, and die miserably, unless he went to the chief, paid him a certain fee, and said, “Give me a charm, for I have slain a man.”’ The Angoni, like the Zulus, apply the notion to killing a man in battle, and think that, unless they gash the bodies of the slain, so as to let out the air from the intestines, and prevent the corpse from swelling, they will be attacked by a mysterious disease which causes their own bodies to swell up. (This precise symptom is not given in the accounts before us, but is believed in by the Zulus, and probably by the Angoni.) The Angoni afterwards dance a war-dance ‘to throw off the _chirope_.’ The word appears to be connected with _mlopa_, ‘blood,’ used particularly of blood shed in killing—as of animals in hunting—and the idea is that the spirit of the slain enters the body of the slayer. This is even the case with animals; and hence it is the custom for the hunter to cut off a small piece of the meat as soon as he has shot any animal, throw it on the fire, and eat it, ‘because of the spirit of the beast that enters into one if one does not.’ The Angoni and various other tribes west of the Lake have a belief that there is a distinct relation between smallpox and morality; that, if the disease attacks a village where the moral tone is good, all the patients will recover; whereas, in a place given, as the native statement puts it, ‘to adultery and other sins,’ every one who sickens, young or old, will die. The locality, and various other circumstances, make it unlikely that this is an imported notion.