fore they are entirely uncertain and arbi trary. On few points are the statements of travelers less vague than on the details of native penal customs. What the Abbé Froyart says of the natives of Loango may be said of all but the lowest tribes: "There is no one ignorant of the cases which incur the pain of death, and of those for which the offender becomes the slave of the person of fended." The laws of the Caffre tribes are said to be a collection of precedents of decisions of by gone chiefs and councils, appealing solely to what was customary in the past, never to the abstract merits of the case. There appears, it is said, to be no uncertainty whatever in their administration, the criminality of different acts being measured exactly by the number of cattle payable in atonement. So the cus toms reported from Ashantee manifest a sense of the value of fixed penalties. An Ashantee is at liberty to kill his slave, .but is punished if he kills his wife or child; only a chief can sell his wife, or put her to death for infidelity; whilst a great man who kills his equal in rank is generally suffered to die by his own hands. A wife who betrays a secret forfeits her upper lip, an ear if she listens to a private conversation of her husband. The forms of legal procedure manifest no less regularity than the laws themselves. In Congo, the plaintiff opens the case on his knees to the judge, who sits under a tree, or in a great straw hut built on purpose, holding a staff of authority in his hand. When he has heard the plaintiff's evidence, he hears defendant and witnesses. In de fault of witnesses the affair is deferred, spies being sent to gather ampler information and ground for judgment from the talk of the people. In the public trials of Ashantee the accused is always fully heard, and is obliged either to commit or exculpate himself on every point. On the Gold Coast a plaintiff would sometimes defer his suit for thirty years, letting it" devolve on his heir?, if the
judges, the caboccros, from interested mo tives, delayed to grant him a trial, and thus obliged him to wait, in hopes of finding less impartial or else more amenable judges in the future. Several rules of savag-e jurisprudence be tray curiously different notions of equity from those of more civilized lands. The Abbé Froyart was shocked that, on the com plaint of the missionaries to the King of I.oango of nocturnal disturbances, round their dwellings, the King should have issued an ordinance making the disturbance of the mis sionaries repose a capital crime. -The reason the natives gave him for thus putting slight offences on an equality with grave ones was, that in proportion to the ease of abstinence from anything forbidden, or of the perform ance of anything commanded, was the inexcusableness of disobedience, and the de served severity of punishment. Again, im partiality with regard to rank or wealth, which is now regarded among English speaking people as a self-evident principle of justice, as a primary instinct of equity, is by no means so regarded by savages; for not only is murder often atoned for according to the rank of the murderer as on the Gold Coast or in old Anglo-Saxon law, on the basis, apparently, of the value of his loss in death, but such difference of rank sometimes enters into the estimate of the due punish ment for robbery. Thus the Guinea Coast negroes thought it reasonable to punish rich persons guilty of robbery more severely than the poor, be cause, they said, the rich were not urged to it by necessity, and could better spare the money-fines laid on them. The Caffre law distinguishes broadly and clearly between in juries to a man's person and injury to his property, accounting the former as offences against the chief to whom he belongs, and making such chief sole recipient of all fines, allowing only personal redress where the man's property has been damaged. Thus
