pounds of trade tobacco; two hatchets; two cutlasses; plates and dishes, mugs and glasses, five each; six knives; one kettle; one brass pan; two to three Neptunes (caldrons, the old term being “Neptune’s pots"), a dozen bars of iron; copper and brass rings, chains with small links, and minor articles ad libitum.  The “settlement” is the same in kind, but has increased during the last forty years, and specie has become much more common.[FN#10]

After marriage there is a mutual accommodation system suggesting the cicisbeo or mariage a trois school; hence we read that wives, like the much-maligned Xantippe, were borrowed and lent, and that not fulfilling the promise of a loan is punishable by heavy damages.  Where the husband acts adjutor or cavaliere to his friend’s “Omantwe”—­female person or wife—­and the friend is equally complaisant, wedlock may hardly be called permanent, and there can be no tie save children.  The old immorality endures; it is as if the command were reversed by accepting that misprint which so scandalized the Star Chamber, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”  Yet, unpermitted, the offence is one against property, and Moechus may be cast in damages ranging from $100 to $200:  what is known in low civilization as the “panel dodge” is an infamy familiar to almost all the maritime tribes of Africa.  He must indeed be a Solomon of a son who, sur les bords du Gabon, can guess at his own sire; a question so impertinent is never put by the ex-officio father.  The son succeeds by inheritance to his father’s relict, who, being generally in years, is condemned to be useful when she has ceased to be an ornament, and, if there are several, they are equally divided amongst the heirs.

Trading tribes rarely affect the pundonor which characterizes the pastoral and the predatory; these people traffic in all things, even in the chastity of their women.  What with pre-nuptial excesses, with early unions, often infructuous, with a virtual system of community, and with universal drunkenness, it is not to be wondered at if the maritime tribes of Africa degenerate and die out.  Such apparently is the modus operandi by which Nature rids herself of the effete races which have served to clear the ground and to pave the way for higher successors.  Wealth and luxury, so generally inveighed against by poets and divines, injure humanity only when they injuriously affect reproduction; and poverty is praised only because it breeds more men.  The true tests of the physical prosperity of a race, and of its position in the world, are bodily strength and the excess of births over deaths.

Separation after marriage can hardly be dignified on the Gaboon by the name of divorce.  Whenever a woman has or fancies she has a grievance, she leaves her husband, returns to “the paternal” and marries again.  Quarrels about the sex are very common, yet, in cases of adultery the old murderous assaults are now rare except amongst the backwoodsmen.  The habit was simply to shoot some man belonging to