444 
COWRY SHELLS. 
12 Nov. 
that we were in want of rushes, they had immediately set to work, 
and cut a quantity, which it was the object of their present visit to 
barter for tobacco. 
Several of them wore two or three cowries^ [Cyprcea moneta) 
interwoven with their hair. On enquiring whence these shells had 
been procured, I could get no further information than that of their 
having been obtained from their neighbours by barter. It is, how- 
ever, very probable that these shells, which pass as money in many 
negro countries, and are not of a nature easily to wear away, have 
passed through the hands of many a tribe of Negroes and Caffres, as 
unknown to European geographers as Europe is to them. Many a 
year may have elapsed since they were first brought to Africa ; and, in 
that time, they may have travelled over the Black Continent, from 
one end of it to the other. They may have been often paid as 
tribute, or duty, to some despotic African prince ; or given for the 
hire of a camel, or for a drop of water, in the deserts of the north ; 
or, bestowed as alms on some pitiable enthusiast, toiling on his long 
pilgrimage to Mecca ; or even as the ransom of threatened slavery. 
They may have visited cities whose existence is still unknown to us, 
even by name ; or they may have been for years current at Tim- 
buctoo. Or who can assert that these identical cowries have not 
passed through every village with which the banks of the Niger are 
peopled ; or, alas ! that they have not been once in the hand of our 
unfortunate countryman. Park, or of some of his ill-fated companions; 
or, perhaps, of some earlier, or some later sacrifice to African dis- 
covery. 
To a solitary European, who may find himself eight hundred 
miles in the interior of Africa, some little circumstance will often 
excite a train of reflections, which his imagination, aided by the 
objects and scenes before him, will carry on through all the wander- 
ings of thought. In such strange and distant regions, the mind 
naturally draws comparisons between things present, and things 
absent j and the ready association of ideas, leading it forward over 
