The Latter Gives A Strange Report, Which, However, Was In Some Degree Partially Circulated Before Him, Of A Silent Traffic Being Carried On In The Interior Between The Moors And A Negro Nation, Who Would Not Allow Themselves To Be Seen.

"The reason," he adds, "why these negroes conceal themselves, is, that they have lips of an unnatural size, hanging

Down halfway over their breasts, and which they are obliged to rub with salt continually, to keep them from putrefaction." Thus even the great salt trade of the interior of Africa is not wholly untinged with fable.

The stream became at last so shallow, that Jobson could not ascend any farther, and he began his voyage downwards on the 10th February, intending to return at the season when the periodical rains filled the channel. He was, however, never able to execute this purpose, as he and the company became involved in a quarrel with the merchants, whom he visits with his highest displeasure, representing them as persons alive only to their own immediate interests, and utterly regardless of any of those honourable motives with which all commercial dealings ought to be characterised.

Jobson may be said to have been the first Englishman, who enjoyed the opportunity of observing the manners and superstitions peculiar to the interior of Africa, but that must be taken as only within the narrow limits to which the discoveries at that period extended. He found that the chiefs of the different nations were attended by bands of musicians, to whom he gives the appellation of juddies or fiddlers, and compares them to the Irish rhymsters, or, as we should now compare them, to the Italian improvisatori.

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