20 
TRAVELS IN THE 
This frequency of appeal to written laws, with which the Pa- 
gan natives are necessarily unacquainted, has given rise in their 
palavers to (what I little expected to find in Africa) professional 
advocates, or expounders of the law, who are allowed to appear 
and to plead for plaintiff or defendant, much in the same man- 
ner as counsel in the law courts of Great Britain. They are Maho- 
medan Negroes who have made, or affect to have made, the 
laws of the Prophet their peculiar study ; and if I may judge 
from their harangues, which I frequently attended, I believe 
that in the forensic qualifications of procrastination and cavil, 
and the arts of confounding and perplexing a cause, they are 
not always surpassed by the ablest pleaders in Europe. While 
I was at Pisania a cause was heard which furnished the 
Mahomedan lawyers with an admirable opportunity of dis- 
playing their professional dexterity. The case was this: an 
ass belonging to a Serawoolli Negro (a native of, an interior 
country near the river Senegal) liad broke into a field of corn 
belonging to one of the Mandingo inhabitants, and destroyed 
great part of it. The Mandingo having caught the animal in 
his field, immediately drew his knife and cut its throat. The 
Serawoolli thereupon called a. palaver (or in European terms, 
brought an action) to recover damages for the loss of his beast, 
on which he set a high value. The defendant confessed he 
had killed the ass, but pleaded a set off, insisting that the loss 
he had sustained by the ravage in his corn, was equal to the sum 
demanded for the animal. To ascertain this fact was the point 
at issue, and the learned advocates contrived to puzzle the cause 
in such a manner, that after a hearing of three days, the court 
