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 spirit. All the vital powers are required there to resist the depressing climate. If they are weakened seriously in any way, death is liable to ensue. The profound belief in the power of a witch causes a man who knows, say, that either a nail has been driven into an Nkiss down on the South-West coast, or the Fangaree drum beaten on him up in the Sierra Leone region, to collapse under the terror of it, and I own I can see no moral difference between the guilt of the man or woman who does these things with the intent to slay a fellow-citizen and that of one who puts bush into his chop—both mean to kill and do kill, but both methods are good West African witchcraft. The latter may seem to be an incipient form of natural science, but it seems to me—I say it humbly—that the West African incipient scientist is not the local witch, but that highly respectable gentleman or lady, the village apothecary, the Nganga bilongo or the Abiabok. The means of killing in vogue in West African witchcraft without the direct employment of poison are highly interesting, but I think it would serve no good purpose for me to give even the few I know in detail. There is one interesting point in this connection. I have said that in order to make a charm efficacious against a particular person you must have preferably some of his blood in your possession, or, failing that, some hair or nail clipping; failing these, some articles belonging intimately to him—a piece of his loin-cloth, or, under the school of Nkissi, a bit of his iron. This I believe to hold good for all true fetish charms; but we have in the Bight of Benin charms which are under the influence of a certain amount of Mohammedan ideas—for example, the deadly charms of the Kufong society. This class of charm does not require absolutely a bit of something nearly connected with the