Sso THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



consists in the practitioner sucking at the afflicted part of the patient 

 till he brings out the thing that has produced the sickness. So long 

 as these things are beans, pumpkin-seeds, and the like — and these are 

 what the doctor generally finds — there is nothing about the matter 

 that passes our comprehension. But when I saw one of these per- 

 formers, entirely naked except for a little skin-apron, who was closely 

 watched by many curious persons, at last draw out a living snake, a 

 foot and a half long, I was somewhat astonished. It was a real snake, 

 for the by-standers hastened to kill it. If the sick man failed to get 

 well after this kind of procedure, the burning coal was applied to 

 him. Hottentot quacks generally give the patient to drink of a kind 

 of tea which they compound from plants known to them, and which 

 should cause him to vomit. For the cure to succeed they must find 

 the object by which the man was bewitched and made sick, in the 

 vomited matter. These objects are things which can not usually be 

 found in the stomach nor come out of it. Thus my friends were shown, 

 among the things that had been in this way taken from patients, large 

 pins with glass heads, neatly tied together, crosswise, with a red 

 thread, a piece of wood with several twigs forking from it, and almost 

 as large as the hand, and other things equally curious. So far as I 

 could learn, this process is usually applied to a St. Vitus's dance, which 

 is supposed to be caused by enchantment. 



I close with the relation of an incident in which I was made to play 

 the part of the magic doctor, because it exhibits one of the character- 

 istics of the people. A Hottentot came to me with a story of his 

 nephew being bewitched, and said that he had sought me out after 

 several other white men had declined to help him, because they knew 

 nothing about witchcraft. His nephew, he told me, had been quite 

 well till he had been bewitched by a rival in a love-affair, and nothing 

 could now be done with him, for his convulsions and running around. 

 As this condition had come about all of a sudden, the suggestion of 

 some external cause for it was obvious, and I was satisfied that it was 

 a case of poisoning. For the quacks are adepts in the management 

 of snake and plant-poisons, and produce all their enchantments, when 

 they amount to anything, by some means of the kind. I was glad to 

 have the opportunity of dealing with one of these cases by a remedy 

 of my own. I gave the man a bottle of camphor, with directions for 

 using it, and told him to come back and report the result in a fort- 

 night. He came three weeks afterward, with the empty bottle, and 

 told me joyfully that the sick man was well ; he had vomited up the 

 lion's hairs in which the enchantment was lodged ! — Translated for 

 the Popular Science Monthly from Z>as Aicsland. 



