REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 515 
African religion into four “ schools,” vzz., the Tshi and Ewe, Calabar, 
Mpongwe, and the Nkissim or Fjort. The first of these is mainly 
concerned with the preservation of life, the Mpongwe with the 
attainment of material prosperity, and the Nkissi with the worship of 
the mystery of the power of earth — Nkissi-nsi. The geographical 
distribution of these leading forms is not known. “Sierra Leone 
and its adjacent districts have not been studied by an ethnologist. 
We have only scattered information regarding the religion there.” 
The dominant idea in the “ Calabar School” is reincarnation, with 
attendant human sacrifice at the time of burial. The Mpongwe are 
a negro race with a Bantu language, and the religion “they have 
elaborated and coordinated is Bantu in thought form.” “It has no 
gods with proper priests. Human beings are here just doing their 
best to hold their own with the spirit world, getting spirits under 
their control as far as possible, and dealing with the rest of them 
diplomatically.” Fetishes are everywhere common; in addition to 
the fetish of the town preserved in a fetish house, ‘‘ every fetish man 
or priest has his private fetishes in his own house, one of a bird, 
stones encased by string, large lumps of cinder from an iron furnace, 
calabashes, and bundles of sticks tied together with a string. All 
these are stained with red ochre and rubbed over with eggs.” The 
material objects are not worshiped in themselves but as the things 
in which the spiritual agencies take up their residence. While this 
account of the religion of the West Africans is suggestive and enter- 
taining it is by no means monographic. 
The interesting chapter upon the “ Witch Doctor” is addressed 
rather to the general reader than to the ethnologist ; the conclusion 
is that the witch doctors who succeed in having people killed for 
bewitching do more good than harm. “As to their using hypno- 
tism, I suppose they do use something of the sort at times.” 
Miss Kingsley ascribes the failure of the English in the more 
unhealthy portions of the tropics to the crown colony system. In 
West Africa this has resulted in the disorganization of the native 
society with no compensatory building up. Wars are no longer 
carried on by the English for the purpose of stamping out slavery, 
human sacrifice, and the like, but for the sake of conquest. In the 
dark race have been implanted the strongest feelings of fear and dis- 
trust, while the whites in arrogance and ignorance strive to impose 
their culture upon the subject race without regard for native customs 
or native needs. Property is of three classes: ancestral, connected 
with the office of headmanship; family, in which every member has 
