14 BULLETIN OF THE LIVERPOOL MUSEUMS. 
had evidently been in the pit some days. He was a mass of caked blood, 
which took a considerable time to remove ; and when my brother, Mr. Felix 
N. Roth, District Medical Officer at Warri, who had charge of the wounded, 
examined him, he found three peculiarly shaped holes in the boy’s head—one 
through each cheek, and one deep into the back of the head. The wounds 
appeared to have been made by a thin, blunt instrument, somewhat like an 
engineer's chisel, but never having seen an instrument which would exactly 
fit such mutilations, he was much puzzled as to what could have been this 
murderous weapon. The boy could offer no explanation, except that he and 
many others had been kiiled (!) so that the British should not enter the city 
—that he had been hit with a piece of iron, and then thrown for dead into 
the pit, where he had been five days. . . . Shortly afterwards, in 
examining one of the altars in the King’s compound, a British officer found 
the peculiar instrument here depicted [on Fig. 1]; and on showing it to my 
brother, the latter quickly saw that this must have been the club with which 
some of the wretched captives had been sacrificed. It was thickly encrusted 
with blood, and on being cleaned, showed signs of very great wear. <A 
similar club was found in another compound, but with bent prongs and 
broken handle. On making enquiries, my brother learned that the two 
cup-like arrangements were to collect some of the blood which flows from 
the victim, which was then sprinkled over the bronze heads, carved tusks, or 
other emblems of the worship to conciliate the presiding spirits.” * 
“The second article is a brass box [on Fig. 3] in the form of a shingled 
house, not remarkable for either beauty of design or shape, there being 
little scope for a workman to show his skill on such homely articles as the 
shingles of a house, while the lower portion of the casket is in a quite 
unfinished state. In this lower portion we notice here and there are strips 
of copper evidently cast in when the article was made. Similar pieces of 
iron and copper are not unfrequently met with in other castings from Benin ; 
the object of this arrangement is, however, not known to us. If the box has 
no claim to elegance, it, at least, tells us something about the city when it 
was first visited by Europeans. When the brothers De Bry, in their India 
Orientalis, published, in 1597, the first description of Benin city, they gave 
an illustration of the houses topped with curious square turrets, drawn, not 
from an actual view, but from a verbal description of the city. The artist 
had evidently mistaken the nature of these turrets, and it is probable that 
his authority meant such a turret as is depicted on the above illustration. 
In the British Museum there is a pillar plate (plaque) from Benin showing 
a similar turret to the one on the box. The style of roofing is very different 
in the present day, for, as my brother informs me, the people use palm and 
other leaves, as well as large sheets of Muntz metal, instead of shingles. The 
serpent zigzagging down the roof is similar to those depicted on the casket. 
The Dutch traveller Nyendael, who twice visited Benin, writing in 1702, 
says of one of the city walls, that one corner ‘is adorned at the top with 
a wooden turret sixty or seventy feet high; at the top of all is fixed a large 
copper snake, whose head hangs downwards. This serpent is very well cast 
or carved, and it is the finest I have seen in Benin.’ From the last state- 
ment we may conclude there were several such snakes. The members of 
the punitive expedition state there is still a large copper serpent in the 
attitude above described, to be seen on the roof of the King’s compound in 
Benin. The serpents are not worshipped, but are supposed to be the abodes, 
more or less temporary, of the members of a certain class of spirits, being, in 
fact, guardian spirits of the houses. . . .” H.0.F. 

* Cf. Figures on pp. 60-63 in Bull, Liverp. Mus. Vol. I. 
