432 
TRAVELS IN AFRICA. Chap. LXV1. 
a distinct tribe, although the vocabulary which he col- 
lected of their idiom, shows it to be nothing but a 
slight variety of the Songhay language. However, 
it is clear, that under such circumstances the do- 
minion exercised by this set of half-castes could not 
but be of a very precarious character ; and after a 
protracted struggle with the smaller tribes around, 
they have been entirely crushed by the Tawarek, and 
in most of the towns of Songhay form at present an 
integral part of the degraded native population, 
although they have preserved their name of Rum a, 
or, as the name is generally pronounced, Rumma, and 
still claim a sort of moral ascendancy. 
It will be seen from the preceding sketch, and be- 
come still more apparent from the chronological tables 
at the end of the volume, that Timbuktu has rather 
unjustly figured in Europe as the centre and the 
capital of a great Negro empire, while it never 
acted more than a secondary part, at least in earlier 
times; and this character evidently appears from the 
narrative of Ebn Batuta's journey, in the middle of 
the fourteenth century. But on account of Tim- 
buktu becoming the seat of Mohammedan learning 
and Mohammedan worship, and owing to the noble 
character of its buildings, well deserving to rank as 
a city or " medma," a title which the capital itself 
perhaps never deserved, it always enjoyed great re- 
spect, even during the flourishing period of the latter ; 
and after Gagho or G6go had relapsed into insigni- 
ficance, in consequence of the conquest by the Ruma 
