The fact that the Ophir of Scripture, from which came the famous ‘gold,’ is now believed by most high authorities to have been on the east coast of Africa, renders it highly probable that these ‘ships of Tarshish,’ with Solomon’s sailors on board, may have visited Madagascar. If so, it is easy to account for the close resemblance between certain Malagasy and Jewish customs, such as the scape-goat and the sprinkling of blood, or rather their practice of soaking a piece of bulrush in the blood of the bullock killed at the annual festival of the _Fàndròana_, i. e. ‘the bath,’ and placing it above the lintel of the door of the hut for its sanctification and protection from evil influences. The killing of a bullock at the annual festival of the _Fàndròana_ seems to suggest some slight connexion with the Jewish sacrifice of a bullock on the day of Atonement. Quarrels were made up, and binding engagements entered into, over the body of a slain animal. The Jewish forms of marriage, the practice of levirate marriage, the Jewish law as to bankruptcy, under which the bankrupt and his wife and family were sold into slavery for the behoof of his creditors--there is a Malagasy proverb which says: ‘Pretentious, like a slave of Hova parentage’--and other usages seem all to point in the direction of Jewish influences. There are fifteen different tribes in Madagascar, but the Hova tribe--that occupies the central province of Imèrina, Ankòva (the land of the Hova)--was for about a century the dominant one. The Hovas were not the aborigines of Central Madagascar; these were a tribe or people called the Vazìmba, who were dislodged by the ancestors of the Hovas, and who have been extinct for ages. In their heathen state the Hovas worshipped at the tombs of the Vazìmba, and offered sacrifices to their shades to propitiate them, as they believed they could harm them or do them good. The Hovas might be called the Anglo-Saxons of Madagascar, a race of foreigners who entered the island 1,000, perhaps 2,000, years ago, and who, strange to say, belong to the Malay portion of the human family, and are thus allied to the South Sea Islanders. How the ancestors of the Hovas came to Madagascar is a mystery, as the nearest point from which it is believed they could have come is the neighbourhood of Singapore, upwards of 3,000 miles away. Hova tradition states that their forefathers landed on the north-east coast of the island, fought their way gradually up into the interior, and finally took possession of the central province of Imèrina. That is probably as near the truth as will ever be discovered.