The Machinga are looked down on by some other tribes because they eat fish, which the Angoni, _e.g._, never touch. Rats are forbidden to women, and to those who offer sacrifice; they are considered ‘uncanny,’ for very comprehensible reasons, though this does not prevent their being a very popular article of diet with those not so restricted. Doctors or others who have to treat a patient by scarifying, or, as the natives say, ‘cutting medicine in,’ must not eat elephant. ‘In other cases the individual himself objects to certain meats as being bad for him, specially producing heat and spots all over.... God, they say, made men with these necessities in them; people can’t make mistakes in what abstinence is essential for them.’ On the whole, the various regulations one can find look like scattered parts of a system no longer understood. Doctors, as on the Congo, prescribe abstinence from various things when their patients are recovering from illness. The animals most generally avoided are those which we should class as unclean feeders, such as crocodiles, hyenas, vultures, etc.; because they are _afiti_—feeding on the dead. Folk-stories frequently refer to such prohibitions. Thus, in one, when a girl is married, her mother tells the bridegroom that she must never be asked to pound anything but castor-oil beans. His mother, determined to overcome this fancied laziness, insists on the young wife’s helping to pound the maize; she does so, and is immediately turned to water. Various ‘dances on several occasions,’ which are important items in native life, ought, perhaps, to be mentioned in this place, since they undoubtedly are religious ceremonies; but they can be considered more fully in the course of the following chapters. The same may be said of the _unyago_ or _chinamwali_ ‘mysteries’; but one or two points in connection with the latter may be just touched on here. The _zinyao_ dances held in the villages of the Anyanja on these occasions perhaps embody some tradition, though what it is, no one, so far as I know, has yet made out. Figures are traced by scattering flour on the smooth ground of the _bwalo_, representing animals, usually the leopard, the crocodile, and, strangely enough, the whale. What the word _namgumi_, which is thus translated in Dr. Scott’s dictionary, really means, or is derived from, it would be interesting to know—though reports of such an animal may have been received from the coast people. Never having seen the _zinyao_, as these figures are called, I can form no opinion as to what the _namgumi_ is intended to represent. The word is common to Nyanja and Yao; perhaps adopted by the former from the latter, in which it means ‘a large fish, the picture of which is drawn on the ground by the head-instructor on the day of sending the boys back to their homes.’ But some light may be thrown on the matter by the fact that Mr. Lindsay (of the Limbi, Blantyre), passing through the bush where one of these ceremonies had