516 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST.  [VOL. XXXIII. 
a certain share; and private, that which is gained by private exertion 
in addition to that which properly belongs to the first two classes. 
The general tendency, however, is for all property to become family 
property. Mother-right prevails, and all forms of property are sub- 
ject to the same law. “ In West Africa there is not one acre of land 
that does not belong to some one.” 
In an appendix of 123 pages M. le Compte C. N. de Cardi de- 
scribes the customs, religion, etc., of the Niger Coast Protectorate. 
The custom of sacrificing human beings, we are told, has been stead- 
ily increasing of late years at Benin City, which has become more 
and more a holy city among the pagan tribes. He repeats Miss 
Kingsley’s statement that the natives believe in a Supreme Being, 
but as he is always doing good, the sacrifices are not intended for 
him, but for a malignant spirit whose thirst for blood is thus appeased. 
Among the “ Brassmen ” the feather ordeal is employed for the detec- 
tion of criminals. The Ju-Ju man thrusts a feather from the under 
part of a fowl’s wing through the tongue of the accused, forcing the 
quill down from above; if the feather breaks as he draws it out below, 
the person is guilty. In New Calabar the Ju-Ju priest can “so dis- 
guise a person that his own mother would not recognize him,” as one 
of the natives declared, and “that they could cause a tree on the 
banks of a river to bend its stem and imbibe water through its top- 
most branches; that they could change themselves into birds and 
fly away; and, lastly, that they could make themselves invisible 
before your eyes, and so suddenly that you could not tell when they 
had done so.” Throughout this book we are impressed with the fact 
that human life is very cheap in West Africa; witchcraft, human sac- 
rifice, cannibalism, murder, and slavery, which alone have taken 
4,480,000 souls from this coast during the last two centuries, all con- 
tribute toward making West Africa an unpleasant place to live in, 
even if the climate itself were not a murderous one for both whites 
and blacks. In the Niger Delta infanticide is quite common ; twins 
and children born with teeth are destroyed, as well as women who 
become the mothers of more than four children. The work contains 
many illustrations of interest to the ethnologist. FRANk RUSSELL. 
Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians.!— The Bella Coola 
tribe has diminished in numbers, owing to the ravages of disease, 
until it now contains but a few hundred souls. They speak a dia- 
lect of the Salishan language, but are isolated from the main body of 
1 Boas, Franz. Mem. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., vol. ii, Pt. ii. New York. 
