practice by sending it into patients to fetch out other witch powers, sisas, or any miscellaneous kind of devil that may have got into them. His position is totally different from that of the layman. He is known to possess a witch power, and the knowledge of how to employ it; but instead of this making him an object of aversion to his fellow-men, it secures for him esteem and honour, and the more terrifically powerful his power is known to be, the more respect he gains; for suppose you were taken ill by a real bad devil, you would prefer a medical man whose power was at least up to that devil's fighting weight.
Nevertheless his having to keep the dangerous devil in his own inside exposes the witch doctor to grave personal danger, for if, from a particularly healthy season, or some notorious quack coming into his district, his practice falls off, and his power is thereby not kept fed, that unfortunate man is liable to be attacked by it. This was given me as the cause of the death of a great doctor in the Chiloango district, and I heard the same thing from the Ncomi district, so it is clear that many eminent men are cut off in the midst of their professional career in this way.
As for what this power is like in its corporal form, I can only say that it is evidently various. One witch doctor I know just to the north of Loango always made it a practice to give his patients a brisk emetic as soon as he was called in, and he always found young crocodiles in the consequences. I remember seeing him in one case secure six lively young crocodiles that had apparently been very recently hatched. These were witch powers. Again, I was informed of a witch who was killed near the Bungo River having had found inside him a thing like a lizard, but with wings like a bat. The most peculiar form of witch power I have heard of as being
