September 



1911] 



NATURE 



317 



Rudolf — though it has so many affinities with the Suk 

 in regard to head-dress, costume, and customs, is far 



tore nearly related in the Masai-Bari group in lan- 

 In fact, this book supplies a good deal of 



viiliin-' which would show that Nandi and Suk and 

 the allied languages, though they must be classed in 

 the same group with the Nilotic and Masai tongues, 

 nevertheless stand very much apart from their con- 

 geners, and no doubt include a considerable element 

 of pre-existing tongues quite unrelated to those sex- 

 denoting languages which sprang into existence in the 

 Nile Valley, influenced, it may be, in a slight degree 

 by the Hamitic tongues of invading White men. 

 In a general way it may be said 



that the Masai-Bari-Turkana sec- 

 tion of these Nilotic tongues is sex- 



denoting, and that tin- other groups 

 Shiluk-Dinka-Jaluo and Nandi- 



Suk) are not; or, at least, that the 



principle of indicating the female 



-. \ in pronouns and prefixes has 



very much weakened. In reference 



to this argument may be mentioned 



the tendency on the part of certain 



German and English writers on 

 African languages in recent times to 



persist in classing the Nilotic lan- 

 guages or members of the Nilotic 



familv as " Hamitic," because they, 



tike tin' totally unrelated Bongo 



language group of the western 



Egyptian Sudan, are sex-denoting. 



This idea in the syntax may have 



been inspired originally by invading 



Caucasians of Hamitic speech, but 



the result is attained, not — as in 



Che case of Hausa and Musga — by 



the deliberate adoption of Hamitic 



feminine particles, but by the use of 



Negro vocables common also to th< 



Bantu languages to indicate sex, 



such as ol or In for the masculine 



(Bantu, lume), and na or nya 



(a word originally meaning 



"mother") for the feminine. 

 A great many interesting points 



in connection with African philology 



are indicated or are explained in 



this valuable little book, which may 



be finallv commended for its light- 

 ness in the hand and for the mass 



of first-rate information which is 



packed into a small compass. 



H. H. Johnston. 



impression of her keen enjoyment of the scenery, and 

 her enthusiastic admiration of the people. She dedi- 

 cates her book to the New Zealanders who taught her 

 to love their land. She rode from the Canterburv 

 Plains across the Southern Alps to the western coast, 

 and then down Westland, and back by the southern 

 road to the eastern side of the New Zeaiand Alps. The 

 be Kile is illustrated by forty-eight excellent photographs 

 and two maps. The author is not a geographer, and 

 it was apparently only the special charm of the New 

 Zealand flora that has roused her interest in botanv ; 

 she was startled to find that the New Zealand lily is a 

 tree, the Cordyline, that the pines equally exceed the 



WESTLAND— A NEW ZEALAND 

 PROVINCE. 1 



WESTLAND is the province on 

 the western coast of the 

 South Island of New Zealand. Its 

 name brings back a vision of a land 

 lovered by forests of tropical luxuriance, rising from a 

 ■blue sea fringed by a white line of surf to blue moun- 

 tains capped with fields of snow, of clean glaciers flow- 

 ing steeply down into glades of tree ferns, and of a 

 succession of pictures so varied and all so perfect in 

 composition that we regard Westland as the most 

 beautiful country it has been our privilege to see. 



Miss M. Moreland tells in this volume the storv of a 

 ride through this district ; and though she gives singu- 

 larly little information, her book conveys a pleasing 



1 "Through South Westland : a Journey to the Haast and Mount 

 Aspiring, New Zealand." By A. Maud Moreland. Pp. xviii+221. 

 (London: Witherby and Co., iqir.) Price7j.6if.net. 



stunted pines of Scotland, and that the flax, the name 

 of which sin- always spells Formium, has a much 

 longer and stronger fibre than the European flax. She 

 expresses her great indebtedness fur her knowledge of 

 the plants to the work of Laing and Blackwell. 



While in Westland she visited a survey camp, and 

 one of its members talked to her so enthusiastically 

 about the silver cone of " Mount Aspiring " that she 

 resolved to visit it, and after sundry misadventures 

 reached the valley at its foot. She did not climb it. 

 The first ascent was reserved for Captain Head. " For 

 us," she says, "it is enough to have seen the great 

 Silver Cone against the blue ; we come no more." This 



