480 
THE KILIMA NJARO EXPEDITION. 
of this; the fact is already recognized by students of 
African languages, that in the northern half of the 
continent there are bewildering multitudes of diverse 
tongues belonging to many independent families, and 
apparently irreducible to a common origin. Yet cross 
the irregular boundary-line which runs over the con¬ 
tinent from 6° N. on the west coast to the Equator on 
the east coast—viz. the northern limit of the Bantu 
speech—and what do we find ? Why that the whole 
of the southern half of Africa, with the exception of 
the Masai and Gfalla intrusion in the north-east and 
the Hottentot enclave in the south-west, 2 is the 
domain of a single homogeneous family of languages, 
the Bantu differing perhaps less among themselves 
than do the many offshoots of the Aryan stock. The 
only other African tongues which in any way approach 
the Bantu (as regards similarity of structure) occupy 
little isolated patches of country in Central and 
Western Africa, surrounded often by totally dissimilar 
forms of speech. Originally, there is little doubt, the 
primal Bantu language was as one of these, a member 
of a little group of prefix-governed tongues developed 
somewhere in the heart of Africa. Peculiar circum¬ 
stances gave the people who spoke it the opportunity 
of playing a great role in unwritten African history; 
and the Bantu negroes, at one time very likely an 
obscure and unimportant tribe like the Temne and 
Bulom of Sierra Leone, the Efik of Old Calabar, or 
the Tumale of Kordofan, became the ruling and almost 
either extremity of the Bantu language-field, separated as widely as 
are Galla and Silha, yet differing from each other only as Latin from 
Greek. 
2 I hardly think it worth while to except the languages of the 
Pigmy races (Obongo and others) from this general statement, as we 
know too little of them to pronounce as to their affinities. 
