The French officials, I believe, rightly place considerable importance upon this powerful Mossi people, and they have been highly successful in their relations with them. The governor of the colony of the Haute Volta told me that the Moro Nabá was a man of exceptional character and loyalty. The position has been hereditary in his family for 800 years, and there is an established tradition that the Moro Nabá never leaves the capital of Ouagadougou. The present king, however, has a son whom he has consented to have sent for study to Tunisia where the climate is considered favorable. I saw two of his daughters in attendance at the school for girls located in this French post, one of whom desires to be trained as a nurse or sage femme. The father of the present ruler accepted French authority, and the son has been especially devoted in his allegiance. While under the French system administrative authority is entirely vested in the governor, the Moro Nabá is consulted, and his political and religious influence utilized. He has a chief minister and several other ministers in charge of agriculture, trade, stock raising, and war. The chiefs of the district who have oversight over the chiefs of villages pay to the Moro Nabá a devotion cultivated by centuries of obedience, and consider him in authority only second to the French commander.

Ouagadougou has been a French post for a good many years. Trees planted at the founding of the station, now overhang the streets and are filled with bright and noisy birds. There are the bureau of the cercle, the military post, several trading houses, comfortable

residences each occupying a full block, a mission of the White Fathers, and to the east of the old town a new group of government buildings, erected since the Haute Volta became a separate colony. These buildings include the residence of the governor and the branches of administration.

There is here an interesting native hospital in charge of a devoted physician. This hospital had only been open a few months, but the doctor was fully occupied with cases, and there were about a hundred outpatients daily applying for relief. The buildings were of mud or adobe, grouped on a pavilion plan and divided into wards. One of these wards was for maternity cases, which, in spite of anticipations to the contrary, was being well patronized. The doctor had as assistants a young native who had been medically trained, and a mid-wife or sage femme who was a young woman of mixed French and black parentage. The doctor stated that there was little intestinal infection in that colony, but he was having a good many pulmonary as well as malarial cases. Tropical ulcers he was successfully treating by fumigating them with iodoform.

There is one curious affliction which besets the native especially during the wet season, from June to December. It is the Guinea-worm which finds lodgment under the skin of the limbs, and grows within the leg to the proportions of an angleworm. These worms have to be extricated with care lest they be broken off in the process. The native digs around in the ulcer formed by his little enemy, and captures it

by the tail. This tail he then fastens to a small stick which he leaves dangling from his leg. Each day the body of the worm is wound up a little more tightly over the stick until it is gradually withdrawn from the wound.

Ouagadougou is a center also in the French plan of instruction. This plan provides primary or village schools, of which there are sixteen in the colony of Haute Volta, with native teachers who have secured their education at Dakar, a regional school giving three years of instruction, and a superior school giving two. Graduates of this last school are selected on a competitive basis to complete their education at Dakar. Instruction is entirely free, and for the superior school there is a home and refectory. The object of these schools is, primarily, to train office assistants, the postal clerks, telegraph operators, mechanics, chauffeurs and nurses. School gardens are attached to these schools, and are generally excellent. In them are raised all kinds of vegetables, and also bananas, papayas, and pineapples. A few are experimenting with lemon trees and grape-vines.

The route from Ouagadougou to the Côte d'Ivoire proceeds southwesterly across a country that gradually becomes more thickly forested with shrubs and trees. The upper waters of the Volta Noire are crossed by a ferry near the post of Boromo. In the dry season it is a stream of only about a hundred feet in width, but in the rainy season it is a great current, five hundred to six hundred meters wide. The tropical forest spreads northward along the course of such streams, and with

the forest comes the tse tse fly-the transmitter of the sleeping sickness. There was a region here of about thirty kilometers breadth apparently without inhabitants, a sort of "no man's land", between the Mossi and the tribes to the west and south.

The Bobos whose villages presently appeared are apparently a numerous African tribe, but of a lower order of intelligence and culture than the Mossi. The stark nakedness attributed to Africa begins to show itself among these people. The clothing and adornment of the women are limited to smooth shaving of the head, a stone or glass pin which protrudes from a hole punctured in the lower lip, a belt and little aprons made of fresh plaited leaves about the size of the two hands. The lives of the Bobos are obviously povertystricken, though their markets are thronged. The center of their administration is Bobo Djoulasso. The post here is an attractive one. Fine gardens surround the residence. The streets are shaded by kapok trees with their brilliant blossoms, and by mangos. The administrative personnel here forms quite a little colony. There are the administrateur and his wife, an assistant administrateur, a captain of troops, an inspector, a chief of postal service. A garage is maintained, and during the dry season a limited automobile service is furnished from this point. The natives are "fetishists" or pagans, but even in this circle, an occasional mosque was seen, supported, I suppose, by the nomadic Fulas or by the wandering tradesmen, “djoulas”, from the valley of the Niger and Senegambia.