If then we would understand the African, if we would distinguish between his mentality and a state of imbecility, we must bear in mind that, since according to his conception innumerable spirits at variance with each other preside over nature, uniformity, constancy and dependability are not to be expected. The rainbow, he says, is a serpent, which has the power of making itself visible or invisible at will. If a mountain disappear behind the clouds he has no difficulty in believing that a spirit who inhabits the mountain has removed it, and that he brings it back when the sun shines. The white man who does not accept this explanation and demands a natural and knowable cause does not thereby manifest a knowledge of nature but an ignorance of spirits. The canoe which carries him safely to-day may lose its buoyancy and sink beneath the waves to-morrow. In some of their fables, at the utterance of a magic word a ship may sink, a house may fall, a man be reduced to physical and mental impotence; and such fables are scarcely distinguishable from fact in his conception. At their first contact with the white man they suppose that the beads, cloth and other goods which he displays are made by himself, by some magic process, as easy when known as the utterance of a word; and they suppose that we could without effort make them as rich as ourselves. If a house or a town should burn down there is little use in looking for the cause, as it may have been set on fire by some ancestor who is angry at being neglected. When Du Chaillu visited a certain town in which the people had never before seen a white man, regarding him as a spirit, they all declared that a great rock near the town had been moved by him and was not in the same place it had been before. This inspired them with dread. But when the smallpox broke out among them and the scourge followed him with the persistency of fate, there was no doubt in their minds but that he had caused it; and meanwhile they made not the slightest effort to protect themselves against the contagion. They regarded him with increasing fear and hostility until at last his journey came to a disastrous end. He and his party turned and fled while the natives pursued with poisoned arrows. But they soon desisted from the pursuit; for, they declared, their arrows rebounded harmless from his body, and sometimes even passed through him and did him no injury. In all this let it not be supposed for a moment that the native is a fool. He is true to his philosophy of nature: but his philosophy is wrong. He knows nothing of the doctrine of God,—of one Intelligence presiding over all nature, and that natural laws are therefore persistent and uniform.