The Pigmies [says Johnston] have practically no religion, and no trace of spirit- or ancestor-worship. They have some idea that thunder, lightning, and rain are the manifestations of a Power or Entity in the heavens, but a bad Power, and when (reluctantly) induced to talk on the subject, they shake their heads and clack their tongues in disapproval, for the mysterious Something in the heavens occasionally slays their comrades with his fire [lightning]. They have little or no belief in a life after death, but sometimes think vaguely that their dead relations live again in the form of the red bushpig, whose strange bristles are among the few brightly coloured objects that attract their attention. They have no settled government or hereditary chief, merely clustering round an able hunter or cunning fighter, and accepting him as law-giver for the time. Marriage is only the purchase of a girl from her father. Women generally give birth to their offspring in the forest, severing the navel string with their teeth, and burying the placenta in the ground. The dead are usually buried in dug graves, and if men of importance, food, tobacco, and weapons are buried with the corpse. [Illustration: Tribunal at Boma. Sentencing a Native to Death for Cannibalism Committed in the Upper Congo.] [Sidenote: Cicatrisation.] The same authority has observed that all the Bantu-speaking forest folk on the Upper Congo practise cicatrisation. Scores and weals of skin are raised either by burning or cutting with a knife, and introducing the irritating juice of a plant into the wound. The effect of this is to raise on the surface of the body large or small lumps of skin. Sometimes these raised weals are so small that they produce almost the effect of tattooing; at other times they are large, ugly excrescences. The Babira people cicatrise their chests and stomachs; but in the forest, toward the waters of the Congo, their faces are hideously scarred. Both men and women of the Bantu Kavirondo extract the two middle incisor teeth from the lower jaw, in the belief that if a man retains all his lower incisor teeth he will be killed in warfare, and that if the wife fails to pull out her teeth it may cause her husband to perish. For the same reason of averting ill-fortune, a woman inflicts cuts on the skin of her forehead, which leave small scars. The women also, as a means of securing good fortune for themselves and their husbands, make a number of small incisions, usually in patterns, in the skin of the abdomen, into which they rub an irritant, so that huge weals rise up into great lumps of skin. The Kavirondo husband, before setting out to fight or starting on a journey attended with great risks, usually makes a few extra incisions on his wife’s body. [Sidenote: A Gross Fraud.]