462 
HISTORY OF MADAGASCAR. 
The people then assemble, and deliberate and determine 
as to the time, place, and parties to commence with. After 
this they again meet at the time agreed on, to receive the 
mutual criminations, and ascertain the precise number of 
those said to be 66 bewitched.” A lamb whose dam is dead, 
and therefore called a poor lamb, is brought to the spot by 
two men, (leprous, if such are at hand,) that curses may be 
denounced against false accusations, malice, and criminal 
concealment, through friendship,—a crime, in such cases, 
in the estimation of the Malagasy, equal to “ misprision of 
high treason.” The lamb having been killed, is mangled ; 
the head cut off and placed at the tail, and the tail cut off 
and placed at the bleeding neck, and the fore and hind feet 
cut off and reversed. The lepers walk near the people, and 
say, 66 If any accuse through malice and hatred, or on account 
of former disputes or litigation, let him be accursed utterly, 
dried up from the earth ; and having none to succeed him, 
let him become a piaculum for his town, let him become 
leprous, and be divided and mangled as this lamb. Or if 
any one conceal, whether father or mother, brother or sister, 
relation or Mend, whom he knows to be mamosavy, “ be¬ 
witched,” let him be as this lamb, and without one to succeed 
him for ever!” 
This finished, the accusations are made—“ I have seen 
one,” says an accuser, <c with his cloth over his head, playing 
on a tomb, or on the pillow of the dead;” “ and I,” says 
another, “ have seen one nursing a wild cat in the moat, or 
descending into the cattle-fold ;” “ and I,” says another 
accuser, 66 have seen one dancing on the grass fresh taken 
from the stomach of a newly killed animal,”—or, I have seen 
one going into a house at midnight,—or, committing murder, 
or, having given food to a sick man, which has proved fatal. 
They are then asked if they are agreed in their accusations, 
