Kinship of Man with Animals 161 



forced in self-defence to kill a lion, they do so with great regret and 

 rub their eyes carefully with its skin, fearing to lose their sight if 

 they neglected this precaution l . A Mandingo porter has been known 

 to offer the whole of his month's pay to save the life of a python, be- 

 cause the python was his totem and he therefore regarded the reptile 

 as his relation ; he thought that if he allowed the creature to be killed, 

 the whole of his own family would perish, probably through the venge- 

 ance to be taken by the reptile kinsfolk of the murdered serpent 2 . 



Sometimes, indeed, the savage goes further and identifies the 

 revered animal not merely with a kinsman but with himself; he 

 imagines that one of his own more or less numerous souls, or at all 

 events that a vital part of himself, is in the beast, so that if it is 

 killed he must die. Thus, the Balong tribe of the Cameroons, in 

 West Africa, think that every man has several souls, of which one is 

 lodged in an elephant, a wild boar, a leopard, or what not. When 

 any one comes home, feels ill, and says, " I shall soon die," and is as 

 good as his word, his friends are of opinion that one of his souls has 

 been shot by a hunter in a wild boar or a leopard, for example, and 

 that that is the real cause of his death 3 . A Catholic ^missionary, 

 sleeping in the hut of a chief of the Fan negroes, awoke in the 

 middle of the night to see a huge black serpent of the most dangerous 

 sort in the act of darting at him. He was about to shoot it when the 

 chief stopped him, saying, " In killing that serpent, it is me that you 

 would have killed. Fear nothing, the serpent is my elangela 4 ." 

 At Calabar there used to be some years ago a huge old crocodile 

 which was well known to contain the spirit of a chief who resided in 

 the flesh at Duke Town. Sporting Vice-Consuls, with a reckless 

 disregard of human life, from time to time made determined attempts 

 to injure the animal, and once a peculiarly active officer succeeded in 

 hitting it. The chief was immediately laid up with a wound in his 

 leg. He said that a dog had bitten him, but few people perhaps were 

 deceived by so flimsy a pretext 5 . Once when Mr Partridge's canoe- 



1 T. Arbousset et F. Daumas, Relation d'un Voyage d'Exploration au Nord-Est de la 

 Colonie du Cap de Bonne-Esperance (Paris, 1842), pp. 349 sq., 422 — 24. 



2 M. le Docteur Tautain, "Notes sur les Croyauces et Pratiques Eeligieuses des 

 Banmanas," Revue d'Ethnographie, in. (1885), pp. 396 sq. ; A. Rancon, Dans la Haute- 

 Gambie, Voyage d'Exploration Scientifique (Paris, 1894), p. 445. 



3 J. Keller, "Ueber das Land und Volk der Balong," Deutsches Kolonialblatt, 

 1 Oktober, 1895, p. 484. 



* Father Trilles, "Chez les Fang, leurs Moeurs, leur Langue, leur Religion," Les 

 Missions Gatholiques, xxx. (1898), p. 322. 



s Miss Mary H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (London, 1897), pp. 538 sq. As 

 to the external or bush souls of human beings, which in this part of Africa are supposed to be 



lodged in the bodies of animals, see Miss Mary H. Kingsley, op. cit. pp. 459 461 ; R. Hen- 



shaw, "Notes on the Efik belief in ' bush soul,' " Man, vi. (1906), pp. 121 sq. ; J. Parkinson, 

 "Notes on the Asaba people (Ibos) of the Niger," Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 

 xxxvi. (1906), pp. 314 sq. 



D. H 



