102 BKCHUANA LANGUAGE. 



to regret want of opportunity for investigating this re- 

 markable and yet controllable agent on the nervous system. 

 Its usual proximity to camel-thorn trees may be accounted 

 for by the probability that the giraffe, which feeds on this 

 tree, may make use of the plant as a medicine. 



During the period of my visit at Kuruman, Mr. Moffat, 

 who has been a missionary in Africa during upwards of 

 forty years, and is well known by his interesting work, 

 ' Scenes and labours in South Africa,' was busily engaged 

 in carrying through the press, with wluVm his station is 

 furnished, the Bible in the language of the Bechuanas, 

 which is called Sichuana. This has been a work of im- 

 mense labour ; and as he was the first to reduce their 

 speech to a written form, and has had his attention directed 

 to the study for at least thirty years, he may be supposed 

 ±o be better adapted for the task than any man living. 

 Some idea of the copiousness of the language may be 

 iormed from the fact that even he never spends a week 

 at his work without disccovering new words ; the phe- 

 nomenon, therefore, of any man who, after a few months' 

 or years' study of a native tongue, cackles forth a torrent 

 of vocables may well be wondered at, if it is meant to 

 convey instruction. In my own case, though I have had 

 as much intercourse with the purest idiom as most English- 

 men, and have studied the language carefully, yet I can 

 never utter an important statement without doing so 

 very slowly, and repeating it too, lest the foreign accent, 

 which is distinctly perceptible in all Europeans, should 

 render the sense unintelligible. In this I follow the 

 example of the Bechuana orators, who, on important 

 matters, always speak slowly, deliberately, and with 

 reiteration. The capabilities of this language may be 

 inferred from the fact that the Pentateuch is fully ex- 

 pressed in Mr. Moffat's translation in fewer words than 

 in the Greek Septuagint, and in a very considerably 

 smaller number than in our own English version. The 

 language is however so simple in its construction, that 

 its copiousness by no means requires the explanation that 

 the people have fallen from a former state of civilization 

 and culture. language seems to be an attribute of the 

 human mind and thought ; and the inflections, various 

 as they are in the most barbarous tongues, as that of the 

 Bushmen, are probably only proofs of the race being 

 human, and endowed with the power of thinking ; the 



