LANGUAGES OF THE KILIMANJARO DISTRICT. 485 
Bantu languages, many interesting conjectures may 
be made as to the original borne and primitive 
condition of this people. Thus tbe fact that 
similar words are used in tbe remotest and most 
widely separated members of tbe group to express 
“ leopard,” 6£ elephant,” a hippopotamus,” “ buffalo,” 
“ pig/’ “ ape,” 66 monkey,’ 5 “ grey parrot, 55 “ bee,” 
&c., leads us to believe that these creatures were 
familiar to the primitive Bantu race; while we may 
infer that because the rhinoceros, giraffe, lion, ostrich, 
and zebra are known by many different and varying 
terms in the dialects of those tribes acquainted with 
them, they were unknown to the forefathers of the 
people in their ancestral home. Now the first-men¬ 
tioned list of creatures (with many others which might 
cated condition from Madagascar into Africa, but rather that most 
domesticated animals in that island bear Bantu names, and in all 
likelihood owe their origin to importation from the Mosambique 
coast, we may further consider, for weighty linguistic reasons, that 
the region of South-east Africa opposite Madagascar was a very 
unlikely site for the original home and starting-point of the Bantu 
people. Again, it might be argued that the fowl may have been 
introduced from Madagascar to the opposite coast, and that it was 
thence passed on into all parts of Bantu Africa—the Lake district, 
Natal, the Cameroons, the Congo—carrying with it everywhere its 
original name. Bat in this case how is it, while all the Bantu 
languages know it by kindred (practically identical) terms, that in 
neighbouring or intervening forms of speech of alien families it is 
designated by entirely dissimilar words Also it must be noted that 
all foreign products introduced into Africa, and acclimatized there 
since the discovery of America, do not carry their original names with 
them from tribe to tribe as they pass across the dark continent. 
Things like Indian corn, sweet potatoes, manioc, the Muscovy duck, 
the pineapple, bear a different designation in almost every separate 
dialect, and though sometimes their original foreign name may turn 
up in the centre of Africa, in the intervening lands nearer the coast 
it has been long since changed and distorted beyond recognition. 
Lastly, the introduction into Madagascar of the domestic fowl is 
usually ascribed to the Arabs, about eight or nine hundred years ago. 
Lew writers on Madagascar mention its presence in the island, and it 
is probably not widely kept even at the present time. 
