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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are for, we shall generally receive some indefinite answer. They may 

 be " for a dead man," " to kill witches," " battle-charms," or " to keep 

 thieves away." Intelligent negroes will sometimes laugh in making 

 such communications, as if they were ashamed at being caught indulg- 

 ing in silly conceits. 



Without going into an elaborate account of African fetiches, it 

 will be enough for our purpose to give a few examples that may illus- 

 trate the way some of them have been developed and the purposes to 

 which they are applied. The first figure represents a specimen of the 

 most primitive character that may be very readily imagined to have 

 originated in the way we have indicated. Between two vine-stocks 

 that have been intertwined in double spirals around slender stems is 





Fig. 1. 



Fig. 2. 



Standing, firmly set in the ground, a knotty stump that has been helped 

 out into the caricature of a face. I found the original of this in a 

 Luba village. Of a similar grade is Fig. 2, a round mass from a ter- 

 mite's nest, about twice the size of a man's head, the porous fungoid 

 substance of which has been set off with carved suggestions of mouth, 

 nose, and eyes. This is a very common ornament of the corners of the 

 manioc-fields. A fetich of a more complicated character is shown in 

 Fig. 3 — a little straw hut, about twenty inches high, shaped so as to 

 suggest some fabulous beast. The original, which belonged to an 

 Ovambo village, looked more formidable than the picture. Some dirt 

 was heaped up under the middle of the tent, in which snail-shells, 



bones, and roots were found when it 

 was stirred with a stick, and which 

 was probably designed to represent 

 the entrails of the creature. I could 

 not get any explanation of the design 

 represented in Fig. 4. We found it 

 one day in a wood in Minungo-land 

 — a cross-road large enough for a ten- 

 pin alley, beginning near the regular path, with a kind of a gallows 

 of slender sticks, and ending at a miniature hut about a yard high. 

 Nothing was found in the hut besides an empty pot ; but two inter- 

 linked straw rings were hanging from the cross-beam of the gallows. 

 When I asked my interpreter Pedro what it was for, he replied that it 



