When we endeavour to ascertain the religion of the negro, by which term we include all the black native tribes of Africa, we find ourselves almost in the position of a modern chemist seeking for the philosopher's stone. In no single book, and I have read very many, can I find any trustworthy evidence of the negro having any religion at all. It is true that travellers in Abyssinia, and those who are now returned from their successful expedition against Magdala, tell us that in Abyssinia there is a form of religion which is evidently a corrupt form of Christianity, but with this exception, the blacks seem to have no idea of that congeries of fact and fiction, dogma, ritual, and practice, which passes current for religion in more civilized countries. Yet though they have no definite idea of a Creator, and the way in which He works throughout the universe, they have a dread of some unseen power, and, like a number of frightened children, dread the effects of "fetish," and the power of the Obi or Obeah man. When the mind is predisposed to fear, and it is so amongst the lower animals as well as in man, it is astonishing at what contemptible objects one may stand aghast. I can vividly remember being sent, whilst a very young child, with a message from an aunt, at whose home I was staying, to the maid, who was washing in an outhouse, but ere I reached the door of the latter, I was terrified at a head which seemed to be rising from the ground, Such was my horror that I ran away, too proud to scream, yet almost fainting with horror. To me that ancient battered barber's doll was "fetish," and if my friends had determined to cultivate the timidity which I then showed, it is quite possible that to this day I might have a dread not dissimilar to that of the African. As it was, my aunt told me that what had scared me, was only a piece of carved and painted wood, and so put me upon my mettle, that I delivered my message and gave the image a kick in the face; yet my valour was short lived, and during the rest of my sojourn I dared not venture within sight of the bugbear. To all intents and purposes that human head was, in my estimation, the guardian of the garden--its presence made all within its influence under taboo--had I ventured to tell a lie, or to have been naughty, I cannot conceive that any punishment would have been greater than being doomed to sit in the presence of the weird image. Hence I can easily understand the abject terror of the African at "fetish," and his dread of the Obeah man, who asserts that he can direct upon whom he will the power of the unknown god. So great is the fear of this negro magician, and so common is that fear to man in general, that we sometimes find the white man as full of it as the black. I have had, for example, under my own care, an Englishman of good education, who, whilst superintendent of a Jamaica plantation, became so cowed by "Obi," that he was obliged to give up his position and return to England, literally insane upon the subject of "fetish" and "Obeah," and wholly unfitted for any work whatever.