been broken up by the death of one whose ghost
was an especial source of terror. But in a little
time there is no more faith in such a ghost.
There is in this matter, as in all others, no reflection,
no reasoning out of conclusions. But the
dead man is held to be altogether extinct. Ask
the negro where is the spirit of his great-
grandfather, he says that he does not know, "It is
done." There is occasional particular belief as
to a certain man's spirit, that it has gone, loup-
garou fashion, into a bird or a gorilla; but
attempt to get upon traces of a belief in
transmigration generally, the answer is, No. It is
beyond the ordinary power of the negro to reason
much from the particular to the general.

Everywhere there is a belief in witchcraft.
Witchcraft is commonly regarded as the cause
of a death as of a recovery. There is still the
utmost vagueness in the fetishism that ascribes
a sort of divinity to serpents, birds, rocks,
mountains, peaks, waterfalls, feathers, teeth,
claws, skins and brains of animals, &c. In
Eastern Africa they have some statuettes for
idols. Only one tribe has been found in the
West that has advanced so far as this, the
Wanyika, and they say that their images came
from the East. The tutelary deity of the Brass
district is a boa-constrictor; of Bonny, it is
the iguana; and these creatures are held in
such reverence that they are allowed to come
into the houses and eat any sort of chop that
lies in their way. It is death to any man to
injure one of these reptiles; and if one be
found dead, it is rolled in a white cloth and tied
in a mat for solemn burial, with military honours
of gun-firing and rum-drinking. By the same
people, a dead slave—and a slave represents the
African currency, as a pound the English—is
only sewn in matting, to be flung without
ceremony to the crocodiles and sharks of the river.

The ju-ju king or priest is the authorised
fountain of superstition. The people of New
Calabar had special reverence for a spirit
supposed to live beyond their own borders in the
Oru, which they describe as the long ju-ju
country. The ju-ju of that place is a woman,
who knows everything, and lives in a valley set
about with hills. When a great crime has been
committed and the guilt of the accused is
doubtful, accused and accuser are said to have
been sent together to this oracle. Having
reached the sacred ground, and arrived at a
certain bush, at that bush the attendants are all
left behind, while the accuser and the accused
advance together. Accusation is then made in
a loud voice, and a mysterious voice in the air
asks the accused whether he be guilty. Denial,
of course, follows, and the culprit is commanded
by the strange voice to go back. If innocent,
he can go home; but if guilty, his feet are glued
to the ground, and while he struggles to retire,
water springing up beside him, rises, rises, rises,
till it covers his head. When he has been thus
killed, the water sinks into the earth again,
sucking his corpse in with it, as far as the
neck, but leaving the head above ground.

At the Egbo meetings, in the Old Calabar
district, suspected persons are accused and tried
by the ordeal of the esere, or poison bean, which
is supposed to kill only the guilty. It nearly
killed Professor Christison, of Edinburgh, when
he tried on his own person its properties, so
that the risk of being found guilty and executed
is much greater in this case than the trial trip
to the long ju-ju country.

The negroes have no system of language, but
make almost of each tribe a nation with a separate
tongue. "The Tower of Babel," says
Captain Adams, "might have been built in any of
these districts;" yet inWestern Equatorial Africa
the tribes were found not sharply parted by
landmarks from each other, but with their villages
intermixed. Interior to the Cameroons, the Old
Calabar and the Bonny districts are a people
called Qua. But the Quas of the Cameroons
can't understand the language of the Quas of
Bonny. As we speak of Equatorial Africa, let
it be noted that negroes living under the equator
are not blacker than those farther from it. In
a damp and moist country, especially when it is
mountainous, the negroes are less black, though
not less distinctly marked with negro features
than in a dry climate. Damp also produces
more hunger and "guamba," or longing desire
for a meat diet. It tends, therefore, in Africa,
to the support of cannibalism. Mr. Hutchinson,
who seems to have lived rather near Borriobola
Gha, says: "I have during the last year seen it
stated in a Sierra Leone newspaper, on the
authority of Mr. Priddy, a missionary of the
Countess of Huntingdon's connexion in that
colony, not that he had heard of, but that he
had seen hampers of dried human flesh carried
about on men's backs to be sold for eating, in
the progress of a recent civil war between the
Soosoo and Timney tribes." The statement was
made at the sixty-seventh anniversary meeting
of that missionary body, and refers to a colony
in which eight millions of money have been
spent for civilisation and liberation of the negro.

At Bonny, secretly, but within sight of our
ships of commerce on the river, cannibal
ceremonies are maintained. The horrors of one of
which Mr. Hutchinson, concealed in a hut, saw
unsuspected, and he says: "I can assure you of
a fact in connexion with one of their reprisal
executions for cannibal purposes, that occurred
during the temporary stay of Mrs. Hutchinson
and myself at Bonny. We were stopping on
board a palm-oil hulk, when one morning there
came to the vessel, for some trading object, the
very ju-ju man whom I had seen at his bloody
work some time previous. It seems that he
had repeated this operation on the day before
the visit now recorded; and on Captain Straw,
who had charge of the hulk, asking him how he
could dare to look in the face of a white lady,
who had heard of his eating the head of a man
the day before (for I must tell you that the head
is a part claimed as a tit-bit by the executioner),
he replied with the most imperturbable sang
froid, expressive of profound contempt for all
the culinary art in the world, 'I no eat him, for
my cook done spoil him; he no put nuff pepper