herbs. Other diseases are caused by spirits not amenable to herb-dwelling spirits; they must be tackled by spirits of a more powerful grade. The witch doctor who belongs to the school of Nkissism will become more profound on this matter still, and will tell you all herbs, indeed everything that comes out of the Earth, have in them some of the power of the Earth, Nkissi nisi; but the general view is the less concrete one—that it is a matter of only certain herbs having power. This I have been told over and over again in various West Coast tongues by various West African physicians, and in it lies the key to their treatment of disease—a key without which many of their methods are incomprehensible, but which shows up most clearly in the methods of the witch doctor himself. In the practice of the general practitioner, or, more properly speaking, the apothecary, it is merely a theory, just as a village chemist here may prescribe blue pill without worrying himself about its therapeutic action from a scientific point of view.
Before I pass on to the great witch doctor, the physician, I must detain you with a brief account of the neglected-by-traveller-because-less-showy African village apothecary, a really worthy person, who exists in every West African district I know of; often, as in the Calabar and Bonny region, a doctor whose practice extends over a fair-sized district, wherein he travels from village to village. If he comes across a case, he sits down and does his best with it, may be for a fortnight or a month at a time, and when he has finished with it and got his fee, off he goes again. Big towns, of course, have a resident apothecary, but I never came across a town that had two apothecaries. It may be professional etiquette, but, though I never like to think evil of the Profession whatever colour its complexion may be, it
