SOCIAL LIFE 173 



to go back to Africa, as he well may have done in 

 moments of temporary depression, whereupon the 

 zealous secretary of a philanthropic Society threat- 

 ened poor Barth with an action for kidnapping if he 

 did not send the boy back at once. Barth was 

 amazed, and sought advice, which was that consider- 

 ing the sectarian bitterness with which the action 

 would probably be carried on, the ease with which 

 thoughtless expressions might be twisted into 

 deliberate words, and the certain cost and tediousness 

 of legal proceedings, it would be wiser for him to 

 submit and to send back the boy. This he did with 

 no little grief, and so all attempt to lexiconise and 

 grammarise the Hausa language was thrown back for 

 many years, during which a knowledge of it would 

 have been of material use in various British opera- 

 tions on the West Coast of Africa. 



A long subsequent attempt was, however, made 

 with success by a small committee, of whom I was 

 one and Major Leonard Darwin another, under the 

 Presidency of Sir George Goldie, through whose 

 efforts sufficient funds were collected to enable Mr. 

 Robinson to study the Hausa language seriously and 

 on the spot. Opportunities for learning it have now 

 been afforded, and are used at Cambridge by pro- 

 spective military and civil servants in West Africa. 



Mr. Crawfurd (1 783-1 868) was then a vigorous 

 old man of considerable moral weight and of great 

 experience, with not a few amusing peculiarities (Sir 

 Roderick Murchison called him laughingly, in public, 

 the Objector General). He had been secretary to 

 Sir Stamford Raffles, and, according to what he told 

 to me, and I presume also to others, he was the sole 



