478 
THE KILIMA-NJA R0 EXPEDITION. 
(b) The Bantu languages of Kilima-njaro. 
At the risk of wearying a majority of my readers, I 
will preface my vocabularies of the Bantu languages 
of the Kilima-njaro district by a slight sketch of the 
main features of this most remarkable family of 
tongues. The word “ Bantu ” has been so often used 
in this book that there are some who may be unaware 
of its meaning, and annoyed at its constant repetition 
and apparently meaningless character. To these, and 
not to the advanced in African studies, I tender this 
little general dissertation. 
Any one who glances at a linguistic map of Africa 
—such an one as Mr. Ravenstein has drawn for Mr. 
Gust’s book on African languages—will hardly fail 
to perceive how thickly certain districts, such as 
Abyssinia, the basin of the White Nile, the Lower 
Niger, or the country round Sierra Leone, are dotted 
with the names of distinct languages. Nor is it 
merely a question of numerous dialects of common 
origin. Many of these tongues—spoken, it may be, 
by only two or three thousand inhabitants of a single 
cluster of villages in a circumscribed area—are quite 
isolated, quite without relationships to other known 
forms of speech ; or again, some of the languages may 
show faint indications of possible affinities—just a 
few hints in their grammatical construction or 
vocabulary, or phonology—sufficient to enable great 
generalizes in philology to bundle them together in 
one common group, in a desperate hope of simplifying 
the arrangement of African languages. Even the 
well-marked and undoubted natural families that over- 
lie these regions—the Hamitic, the Fula, the Nubian, 
the Siluk, the Hausa, the Mandingo—exhibit only 
sufficient similarity of structure in their different 
