redeeming points are, a tender love of family, which displays itself by the most violent ‘kin-grief,’ and a strong attachment to an uninviting home. A certain critic, who had probably never transgressed the bounds of Europe, but who probably had read Macaulay (‘by judicious selection and previous exaggeration, the intellect and the disposition of any human being might be described as being made up of nothing but startling contrasts’), thus complained of my description of Somal inconsistency. ‘This affectionately-atrocious people,’ he declares, ‘is painted in strangely opposite colours.’ Can we not, then, conceive the high development of destructiveness and adhesiveness, to speak phrenologically, combining in the same individual? And are not the peasantry of Connaught a familiar instance of the phenomenon? Such is the negro’s innate destructiveness, that I have rarely seen him drop or break an article without a loud burst of laughter. During fires at Zanzibar he appears like a fiend, waving brands over his head, dancing with delight, and spreading the flames, as much from instinct as with the object of plunder. On the other hand, he will lose his senses with grief for the death of near relatives: I have known several men who remained in this state for years. But why enlarge upon what is apparent to the most superficial observer’s eye? The male dress is a tanned skin or a cotton cloth tied round the waist, strips of hairy cowhide are bound like garters, or the ‘hibás’ of the Bedawin Arabs, below the knee, and ostrich and other feathers are stuck in the tufty poll. The ornaments are earrings of brass or iron wire, and small metal chains: around the neck and shoulders, arms and ankles, hang beads, leather talisman-cases, and ‘ghost-chairs’—the latter usually some article difficult to obtain, for instance, a leopard’s claw. Those near the seaboard have ceased to extract one or more of the lower incisors—a custom whose object was probably the facilitating of expectoration—and they now rarely tattoo, saying, ‘Why should we spoil our bodies?’ They have abandoned the decoration to women, who raise the cutis with a long sharp thorn, prick it with a knife-point, and wash the wounds with red ochre and water. Abroad the Mnyika carries his bow and long skin-quiver full of reed arrows, tipped with iron or hard wood, and poisoned by means of some bulbous root: his shield is a flat strip of cowhide doubled or trebled. He has also a spear, a knife at his waist for cutting cocoa-nuts, a Rungu or knobstick in his girdle behind, and a long sword, half sheathed, and sharpened near the point. He hangs round his neck a gourd sneeze-mull, containing powdered tobacco with fragrant herbs and dried plantain-flower. On journeys he holds a long thin staff surmounted by a little cross, which serves to churn his blood and milk, a common article of diet in East Africa—similarly, the Lapps bleed their reindeer. He also slings to his back a dwarf three-legged stool, cut out