ing a sorcerer in the full sense
of the word, or as merely one of the inferior types of magic men
above referred to. Probably he is only the latter, as I do not think
there are any juvenile sorcerers among the Mafulu, and this particular
person may be quite a young boy; indeed, there is in a village near to
the Mafulu Mission Station a young boy who is supposed to have this
power. As a matter of fact this boy is not quite right in his head;
but this state of mind is not among the Mafulu in any way a necessary,
or indeed a usual, qualification for a sorcerer or magic man of any
sort. The person appealed to will perhaps tell them who has done the
deed, or will make some oracular statement which will lead to his
identification. The culprit identified by him will in any case be a
member of another clan, and most probably of another community. When
he has been discovered, there will probably be a fight, in which
the members of the victim's clan, or even, especially if the victim
be a chief or big person, the whole of his community, will join the
injured relatives, this question of suspected causing of death being,
like that of non-repayment of the price paid for a runaway wife,
one of the frequent causes of intercommunity fighting.

Reverting here to the matter of ghosts and spirits, one cannot help
noting a similarity between, on the one hand, the ghostly element
of living food plants and the ghostly element of human excrement,
which constitute the food of the ghosts, and, on the other hand, the
physical inedible remnants of food recently eaten by an adult victim
and the physical excrement and urine of an infant victim, which are the
media used for hostile sorcery through the power of spirits; though,
as regards the latter, I have no evidence of a belief that the spirits
eat them. I tried to get further into this matter, but was unable to
do so. Again one is struck by the fact that the special _gabi_ tree,
which is the tree used for the interment of chiefs and notables, is
one of the trees whose presence is regarded as indicating a place
inhabited by spirits. These elements of similarity tend, I think,
to suggest the possibility of some confusion in the native mind as
to the difference between ghosts and spirits, or of some originally
ghostly origin in what are now regarded as spirits.

The class of magic men who are something less than sorcerers,
and whose powers are perhaps confined to the knowledge of certain
specific