mortality from tetanus among children, which sometimes is and sometimes is not put down to witchcraft, and the mortality from smallpox and the sleep disease down south in Loango and Kakongo, those diseases not being in any case that I have had personal acquaintance with imputed to witchcraft at all. Indeed I venture to think that any disease that takes an epidemic form is regarded as a scourge sent by some great outraged Nature spirit, not a mere human dabbler in devils. I have dealt with witchcraft itself elsewhere, therefore now I only speak regarding it medically; and I think, roughly speaking, not absolutely, mind you, that the witching something out of a man is the most common iniquity of witchcraft from Cape Juby to Cameroons, the region of the true Negro stock; while from Cameroons to Benguella—the limit of my knowledge to the south on the western side of the continent—the most common iniquity of witchcraft is witching something into him. As in the diseases arising from the loss of the dream-soul I have briefly dealt with the witching something out, I now turn to the witching something in.
I well remember, in 1893, being then new to and easily alarmed by the West Coast, going into a village in Kakongo one afternoon and seeing several unpleasant-looking objects stuck on poles. Investigation showed they were the lungs, livers, or spleens of human beings; and local information stated that they were the powers of witches—witches that had been killed and, on examination, found to have inside them these things, dangerous to the state and society at large. Where from it was the custom to stick up on poles these things as warnings to the general public not to harbour in their individual interiors things to use against their fellow-creatures. They mutely but firmly said,—
