the Bon Général Janvier by General Tazo, the swamp-fever, who he declared was his best aid against the French invader. Something of this irreverence is remarkable in the character of Richard Cœur de Lion. The Wanyika thus hold, with our philosophers, that the Koma is a subjective, not an objective, existence; and yet ghost-craft is still the only article of their creed. All their diseases arise from possession, and no man dies what we should term a natural death. Their rites are intended either to avert evils from themselves or to cast them upon others, and the primum mobile of their sacrifices is the interest of the Mganga, or Medicine-man. When the critical moment has arrived, the ghost, being adjured to come forth from the possessed one, names some article, technically called a Kehi, or chair, in which, if worn round the neck or limbs, it will reside without annoying the wearer. This idea lies at the bottom of many superstitious practices: this negro approach to a ‘sympathetic cure’ is the object of the leopard’s claw, of the strings of white, black, and blue beads, called Mdugu ga Mulungu (ghost-beads), worn over the shoulder, and of the rags taken from the sick man’s body, and hung or fastened to what Europeans call the ‘Devil’s Tree.’ The ‘Kehi’ is preferred by the demon-ghost to the patient’s person, and thus by mutual agreement both are happy. Some, especially women, have a dozen haunters, each with its peculiar charm: one of them is called, ridiculously enough, ‘Barakat,’ in Arabic ‘a blessing,’ and the P.N. of the Æthiopian slave inherited by Mohammed. It has not suited the Moslem’s purpose to proselytize the Wanyika, who doubtless, like their kinsmen the Wasawahili, would have adopted the Saving Faith. As it is, the Doruma tribe has been partly converted, and many of the heathen keep the Ramazan fast, feeling themselves raised in the scale of creation by doing something more than their pagan brethren. The ceremonies are the simplest contrivances of savage priestcraft. Births are not celebrated, and the weakly or deformed infant is at once strangled: it is a failure, and as such it is put away. Children become the property of the mother, or rather of her brother, to be disposed of as he pleases: the only one who has no voice in the matter is the putative father. Circumcision, an old African custom extending from Egypt to the Cape, and adopted from the negroid by the Hebrews, is a semi-religious act performed once every five or six years upon the youths en masse, and accompanied by the usual eating and drinking, drumming and dancing. A man may marry any number of wives; the genial rite, however, is no tie to these fickle souls: it is celebrated by jollifications, and it is broken as merrily.