and the Mpongwe. 
103 
disappeared from Europe, maintains firm hold upon 
the African brain. The idea is found amongst 
Christians, for instance, the “ reduced Indians” of 
the Amazonas River; and it is evidently at the 
bottom of that widely spread superstition, the 
“ evil eye,” which remains throughout Southern 
Europe as strong as it was in the days of Pliny. 
As amongst barbarians generally, no misfortune 
happens, no accident occurs, no illness nor death 
can take place without the agency of wizard or 
witch. There is nothing more odious than this 
crime; it is hostile to God and man, and it must 
be expiated by death in the most terrible tortures. 
Metamorphosis is a common art amongst Mpongwe 
magicians : this vulgar materialism, of which Ovid 
sang, must not be confounded with the poetical 
Hindu metempsychosis or transmigration of souls 
which explains empirically certain physiological 
mysteries. Here the adept naturally becomes a 
gorilla or a leopard, as he would be a lion in South 
Africa, a hyena in Abyssinia and the Somali 
country, and a loup-garou in Brittany. 1 
The poison ordeal is a necessary corollary to 
witchcraft. The plant most used by the Oganga 
(medicine man) is a small red-rooted shrub, not 
unlike a hazel bush, and called Ikazya or Ikaja. 
Mr. Wilson (p. 225) writes “ Nkazya:” Battel (loc. 
1 See “ Zanzibar, City, Island, and Coast,” vol. i. chap. vii. 
