io8 
The Minor Tribes 
bulaire de la langue Ponga ” was printed in the 
“ Memoires de la Societd Ethnologique,” tome ii., 
by M. P. H. Delaporte. 
The other publications known to me are :— 
1. The Book of Proverbs, translated into the 
Mpongwe language at the mission of the A. B. 
C. F. M., Gaboon, West Africa. New York. 
American Bible Society, instituted in the year 
MDCCCXVI. 1859. 
2. The Books of Genesis, part of Exodus, Pro¬ 
verbs, and Acts, by the same, printed at the same 
place and in the same year. 
The missionary explorers of the language, if I 
may so call them, at once saw that it belongs to 
the great South African family Sichwana, Zulu, 
Kisawahili, Mbundo (Congoese), Fiote, and others, 
whose characteristics are polysyllabism, inflection 
by systematic prefixes, and an alliteration, the 
mystery of whose reciprocal letters is theoretically 
explained by a euphony in many cases unintelli¬ 
gible, like the modes of Hindu music, to the Euro¬ 
pean ear. 1 But they naturally fell into the uni¬ 
versally accepted error of asserting “ it has no 
known affinities to any of the languages north of 
the Mountains of the Moon,” meaning the equa¬ 
torial chain which divides the Niger and Nile 
valleys from the basin of the Congo. 
1 I have discussed this subject in my “ Zanzibar,” vol. i. 
chap. xi. 
