;7« 



NA TURE 



[Feb. 2 1, I i 



A more serious blunder is his retention of the unfor- 

 tunate "Nubi-Fulah" family, which has no objective 

 existence, and which he has rashly taken upon himself 

 even to enlarge. On this subject he writes in the true 

 style of the amateur: — "This arrangement [an arrange- 

 ment absolutely unscientific] commends itself to my 

 judgment from its convenience, as enabling me to pass 

 on from the confines of the Hamitic language-field, and 

 sweep into this new group all that is not strictly Biintu, 

 or which cannot be conveniently treated as Negro " (p. 

 142). So in their reports on Egyptian Sudan our officials 

 "sweep" into the Arab group all that is not strictly 

 Negro, and vice versd. And so nearer home our popular 

 ethnographists " sweep " into the " Turanian " group all 

 that is not strictly Aryan, and so on. The scope that 

 this sort of thing gives to discursive writing is about as 

 boundless as is the mischief it does to the cause of scien- 

 tific progress. In future editions Mr. Cust ought relent- 

 lessly to exscind this "convenient" Nuba-Fulah group, 

 and relegate to one of his numerous appendi.xes " all that 

 cannot be conveniently treated " under any recognised 

 divisions. 



These remarks will apply with equal force to the 

 " Hottentot-Bushman Group," of which Mr. Cust again 

 writes : " Following F. Miiller and T. Hahn, I constitute 

 a separate group, and take the opportunity of enlarging 

 its dimensions, so as to sweep in certain tribes speaking 

 apparently languages which differ entirely from any above 

 described " (p. 434). It will be seen that Mr. Cust has 

 constituted himself a sort of African " Spazzacammino," 

 sweeping up and down the continent with an airy reck- 

 lessness which may astonish the groundlings but " can- 

 not but make the judicious grieve." The result in this 

 instance is to scatter over the southern half of Africa a 

 number of tiny little enclaves, all coloured alike and 

 reaching as far north as Abyssinia, which make Mr. 

 Ravenstein's otherwise excellent map look like nothing 

 so much as one of those coloured maps of Scotland with 

 fragments of Cromarty, Elgin, and the other northern shires 

 strewn promiscuously over the face of the land. Now in 

 Scotland these fragments have literally a tribal connec- 

 tion, but the connection between the African enclaves — 

 Tua, Sarwa, Nena, Sania, Akka, Twa, Doko, &c. — is of 

 a purely negative character. None of them speak Negro, 

 Fulah, or Bantu idioms ; therefore let us sweep them 

 together. It is the old joke about elephant and tea-cup, 

 which are said to resemble one another because neither 

 can climb up a tree. 



Besides the general classification, the whole text will 

 need careful revision before the book can be accepted as 

 a standard work of reference on the points with which it 

 professes to deal. Almost on every other page we read 

 such statements as these : — There is " nothing savage " 

 in the Somali nature. There is little doubt that Kanddke 

 was Queen of Napata on the Middle Nile, and a Hamite. 

 The very existence of the Niger was unknown before the 

 present century. The Siwah language is of no import- 

 ance whatever, &c. The account given (p. no) of the 

 word Tamashck is hopelessly muddled. It is stated to 

 have been applied to the people " by the Arabs, and not 

 by the tribes themselves, who scarcely recognise it, and 

 call themselves Imoshagh, or Amazirg," the fact being 

 that Imoshagh and Tamashek are the same word, the 



former masculine, indicating the people, the latter femi- 

 nine, indicating their language. About the closely related 

 Kabail dialect again, Mr. Cust writes : ' I was unable to 

 satisfy myself on the subject of this language until I had 

 personally visited Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sahara, con- 

 ferred with men on the spot, and seen with my eyes the 

 conformation of the country" (p. 106). Here there seems 

 to be some mystification. It is not obvious at first sight 

 what the conformation of the country has to do with the 

 language ; and it is still less obvious how a visit to the 

 Sahara, of which we now hear for the first time, could 

 throw any light on a language scarcely current within the 

 frontier of that region. 



At the same time it is but fair to state that, with all its in- 

 evitable shortcomings, it often betrays evidence of extreme 

 labour profitably bestowed on obscure languages. A good 

 idea of the general treatment of the subject is afforded 

 by the subjoined account of the little-known Komdro 

 group: — "There is no doubt that these languages are 

 African, and not Malayan, like the Malagdsi. Several 

 names are recorded, and it is presumed that they are 

 dialects : — (i) Hinzua, (3) Angazidya, (3) Antilote, (41 

 Mohilla. Elliot left in manuscript a vocabulary of Hin- 

 zua, the dialect of the Island of Johanna, compiled by 

 himself Hildebrandt supplies a considerable one of 

 Ki-Nzuani compiled on the spot. Casalis in his Suto 

 [Se-Suto] grammar gives a dozen words picked up by 

 chance. Bleek in the 'Languages of the Mozambik' gives 

 words picked up by Peters during a week's residence in 

 the island. Hildebrandt remarks that this dialect is only 

 spoken in the Johanna Island, but that the dialects of the 

 other islands only differ a little. It is never committed to 

 writing. For purposes of business the people use theSwahili 

 language in the Arabic character. Steere printed in 1869 

 a short vocabulary of the language of Great Komdro, 

 called Angazidya, supplied by the sons of one of the 

 kings of the islands. Van der Decken remarks that it is 

 only a dialect of Swahi'li, greatly altered in pronunciation 

 and affected by the contact of Malagdsi. Gevrez, a 

 French etnployd in Mayotte, one of the islands, and a 

 French colony, published an account of the group from 

 personal knowledge in 1870. He divides the population 

 into fractions : one-tenth are Arabs, one-tenth are Mala- 

 gdsi, four-tenths are Antilote — a mixture of Arabs and 

 Africans, and four-tenths are of the Bdntu family, though 

 not entirely pure. The Antilote speak a mixture of Malagdsi 

 and Swahili. Very few in the island speak or write pure 

 Arabic, but Swahfli, which is the language of the schools, 

 the towns, and good society. The character used for 

 writing is a corrupted form of Arabic." A. H. Keane 



RECENT TEXT-BOOKS OF DETERMINANTS 

 Die Anfangsgriinde der Deteriniiianten. Von Dr. H. 



Kaiser. (Wiesbaden, 1882.) 

 Die ersten Elemenle der Determinanten Theorie. Von 



Prof. Wilh. Bunkofer. (Tauberbischofsheim, 1883.) 

 EUments de la Theorie des D^teriiiittanls. Par P. 



Mansion. (Paris, 1883.) 

 Tcoria elemental de las Determinantcs. Por D. Dari'o 



Bacas y D. Ramdn Escanddn. (Madrid, 1883.) 



THE literary activity of Germany seems to make it 

 necessary that a new Introduction to Determinants 

 shall appear at least once a year. What amount of good 



