pestilence and famine; circumcision is practised amongst some of them. We have also the pillows or head rests, the strigil, the iron sceptres of the chiefs, the iron industry, all with parallels from the north. Then, again, their musical instruments, their games, and their totems point distinctly to an Arabian influence, which has been handed down from generation to generation long after the Arabians have ceased to have any definite intercourse with the country. During the course of these pages numerous minor illustrations will from time to time appear which point in the same direction. It is a curious ethnological problem which it will be hard to unravel. All over the country sour milk is much drunk and called mast, as it is in the East, and in parts of this country beer is called dowra or doro, a term which has come from Abyssinia and Arabia, and the method of making it is the same. The corn is soaked in water and left till it sprouts a little; then it is spread in the sun to dry and mixed with unsprouted grain; then the women pound it in wooden mortars, and the malt obtained from this is boiled and left to stand in a pot for two days, and over night a little malt that has been kept for the purpose is thrown over the liquid to excite fermentation. It will not keep at all, and is sometimes strong and intoxicating. Women are the great brewers in Mashonaland, and a good wife is valued according to her skill in this department. This Kaffir beer is certainly an old-world drink. There are several classical allusions for what is termed ‘barley beer.’ Xenophon and the Ten Thousand one evening, on reaching an Armenian village in the mountains of Asia Minor, refreshed themselves with what he describes as ‘bowls of barley wine in which the grains are floating.’ The Egyptians too made beer after the same fashion, and used it also in sacrifices. Much that was known in the old world has travelled southwards through Nubia and Abyssinia, and is to be found still amongst the Kaffir races of to-day. Some of the words in common use amongst the Kaffirs in Mashonaland are very curious. Anything small, whether it be a child or to indicate that the price paid for anything is insufficient, they term piccanini; the word is universal, and points to intercourse with other continents. The term Morunko, or Molungo, universally applied to white men, is probably of Zulu origin, and has been connected—with what reason I know not—with Unkulunkulu, a term to denote the Supreme Being. At any rate it is distinctly a term of respect, and certainly has nothing to do with the Mashona language, in which Muali or Mali is used to denote God.