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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
of conferring benefits on science, the value and extent of which itself was 
careless to appreciate and compute. Huge is the debt which philologists owe 
to the labours of British Missionaries in Africa! By evangelists of our own 
nationality nearly two hundred African languages and dialects have been 
illustrated by grammars, dictionaries, vocabularies, and translations of the Bible. 
Many of these tongues were on the point of extinction, and have since become 
extinct, and we owe our knowledge of them solely to the missionaries’ inter¬ 
vention. Zoology, botany, and anthropology, and most of the other branches 
of scientific investigation have been enriched by the researches of missionaries, 
who have enjoyed unequalled opportunites of collecting in new districts ; while 
commerce and colonisation have been so notoriously guided in their extension 
by the information derived from patriotic emissaries of Christianity that the 
negro potentate was scarcely unjust when he complained that “ first came the 
missionary, then the merchant, then the Consul, and then the man-of-war.” 
For missionary enterprise in the future I see a great sphere of usefulness—work 
to be done in the service of civilisation which shall rise superior to the mere 
inculcation of dogma ; work which shall have for its object the careful educa¬ 
tion and kindly guardianship of struggling, backward peoples ; work which, 
in its lasting effects on men’s minds, shall be gratefully remembered by the new 
races of Africa when the sectarian fervour which prompted it shall long have 
been forgotten. 
