October i8, 1917] 



NATURE 



127 



bitten " S. T. C," for in the "Ancient Mariner" we 

 have the well-known lines : — 



Till clomb above the eastern bar 

 The horned moon, with one bright siar 

 Within the nether tip. 



Dr. Greo. Macdonald had a lecture on the wondrous 

 poem, which admirably suited his spiritual nature, in 

 which he gave some explanation of this celestial 

 prodigy, but at this distance I forget what it was. 

 Perhaps some of your readers have more retentive 

 memories. Alex. Macdonald. 



Durris, Aberdeen. 



EQUATORIAL AFRICA TO-DAY.^ 



I HAVE seldom read a more interesting^, easily 

 assimilable, truthful book on modern Africa 

 than this record of Mr, J. Du Plessis's recent 

 journeys backwards and forwards across Equa- 

 torial Africa. Between 191 3 and 1916 the mis- 

 sionary-author visited the Gold Coast and 

 Ashanti, was on the outskirts 

 of Dahome, travelled through 

 Lagos and Abeokuta to Hausa- 

 land, up the Benue to the Shari, 

 explored the western Cameroons, 

 visited a great deal of Belgian 

 and French Congoland, of 

 Uganda and British East Africa, 

 passed from Congoland through 

 Northern Rhodesia, and revisited 

 Nyasaland and the Mocambique 

 coast. 



I have reviewed elsewhere the 

 political and ethical aspects of 

 the book ; let me deal here with 

 the light it may throw on the 

 ethnology and zoology of West 

 and Central Africa. 



"The journey" (from the 

 coast to Ashanti) "which occu- 

 pied Sir Garnet Wolseley . . . 

 four months was accomplished 

 by us in a single day," writes 

 Mr. Du Plessis, who travelled 

 fromi Sekondi to Kumasi by 

 rail. Nevertheless, the mass 

 of the Gold Coast forests retain their former 

 magnificent luxuriance of growth ; and perhaps 

 after the war they mav be used as object-lessons in 

 botany (like those of eastern Sierra Leone). Cer- 

 tainly our official world, especially our Treasury 

 [which grudges the tiny allowance of money for 

 inishing the Flora of Tropical Africa that the late 

 Lord Salisbury ordained), overlooked the fact that 

 those West African and Cameroons forests under 

 the British flag are distinctly among the world's 

 wonders, and, besides being striking in their 

 splendour, are replete with wealth for commerce 

 which we might turn into coin of the realm were 

 l^we only as a nation better educated in the lore 



the twentieth century. Yet Mr. Du Plessis was 



little shocked at evidences of modernity when 

 le saw the forest-dwellers roofing their huts with 



'Thrice through the Dark Continent : A Record of Journeyings across 

 Arrica during the Ye-»rs 1913-16." By I. Du Plessis. Pp. viii+350. 

 ^London; Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917.) Price 14X. net. 



corrugated iron, and when one of them — in excel- 

 lent English — inquired if he was a dentist, as he 

 wanted a tooth stopped ! 



The author has much to say alxjut the real 

 "dangerous animals" of Africa, the insects that 

 spread all manner of germ diseases. His 

 remarks about the vicious and cunning tsetse- 

 flies on the Gribingi River are distinctly 

 interesting. He points out that, while the 

 tsetse-conveyed sleeping sickness is being 

 got well in hand, and even extinguished in 

 French and Belgian Congoland, it is spreading fast 

 and far in Nyasaland and the adjoining part of 

 Northern Rhodesia. Unfortunately, too, in this 

 direction the disease is more virulent and less 

 curable than elsewhere. Apparently, also, it is 

 now proved that the ordinary Glossina inorsitans 

 of South and East Africa, as well as the wicked 

 palpalis, can convey the trypanosomes. 



Mural ornimentation of the Basongi (Belgian Congo). 

 Dark Continent." 



From " Thrice through the 



Mr. Du Plessis tells us much about the interest- 

 ing Munshi or Tivi people south of the central Benue. 

 But he is mistaken in regarding their language 

 as one that is quite isolated and almost unknown. 

 It has recently been effectively illustrated — chiefly 

 in the pages of the African Society's Journal, also 

 in manuscripts that I am shortly publishing ; and it 

 stands out very clearly as a Semi-Bantu language 

 with strong Bantu affinities, but otherwise con- 

 nected as regards word-roots and syntax with 

 other Semi-Bantu speech-forms in Nigeria and in 

 the Cross River basin. 



The author has something to say about the 

 interesting Mundang tribe of the northern 

 Cameroons, and his example of the language in- 

 dicates that, like so many other forms of Sudanic 

 speech, it possesses Bantu word-roots, though it 

 can scarcely be called Semi-Bantu. There must be a 

 strong underlying element of Semi-Bantu in many 



NO. 2503, VOL. 100] 



