Many men consult the oracle on their own account, especially on a journey, either by means of the flour-pyramid, as already described, or by sticking a knife into the ground and leaning two small sticks against it, or laying two sticks on the ground, and a third across them. If they fall down, or are disturbed from their position, the omen is unfavourable. There are many other omens which would cause a party to turn back, unless very much set on an expedition—such as one of them striking his foot against a stump (a common accident, to judge by the number of ulcerated toes one sees), or certain creatures crossing the path—some kinds of snakes, the chameleon, etc.—the partridge’s cry, and so on. The evil-smelling _mdzodzo_ and _mtumbatumba_ ants, on the other hand, are supposed (perhaps by the rule of contraries) to be of good augury. There is a certain system of abstinence from different kinds of food which is probably connected originally with totemism; but either no one has succeeded in getting at the matter except in a very fragmentary way, or else the natives of the present day have forgotten the reasons for the practice, and it only survives in a number of apparently casual and isolated usages. Certain people will not eat some particular kind of meat, either ‘because it makes one ill, or because of some religious scruple or vow, or because one’s mother has for no apparent reason decreed in one’s infancy that a certain food is to be tabu to one.’ It might be more correct to reduce these three alternative reasons to one, because, as a matter of fact, people who have been forbidden some food in their infancy usually become ill if they eat it; and it is no stretch of language to say that they are transgressing ‘a religious scruple’ in doing so. Further inquiry is needed before we can decide whether or not there is a reason behind these prohibitions; quite possibly, as already stated, the people have forgotten that there ever was one, and have no notion of any relationship supposed to exist between them and the forbidden animal or plant, such as the Bechwana clans recognise in the case of the lion, the crocodile, etc. The Rev. D. C. Scott says: ‘Each tribe or family has its particular abstinence from certain foods.’ The Achikunda, so my boatmen told me on the Zambezi, don’t eat hippo; the Apodzo do, as might be expected, they being a tribe who get their living by hunting that animal. This really resolves itself into ‘Apodzo and not Apodzo,’ because the Achikunda are not really a tribe, but a mixed multitude of slaves brought into the country by the Portuguese; and a good many different tribes look on the hippopotamus as sacred. Some of the boys at Blantyre mission-school ‘did not eat hippo’—but on what exact tribal or family grounds, I never made out. The practical result was that some other food had to be provided for them, when one of the teachers arrived from the River with a supply of this meat sufficient for the whole school.