Return to the River. 183 
out to the River in 1842, and had spent twenty 
years of his life in Africa, with occasional fur¬ 
loughs home. He greatly interested me by a work 
which he was preparing. The Gaboon Mission had 
begun its studies of the many native dialects by 
the usual preparatory process of writing grammars 
and vocabularies; after this they had published 
sundry fragmentary translations of the Scriptures, 
and now they aimed at something higher. After 
spending years in building and decorating the 
porticoes of language, they were ambitious of 
raising the edifice to which it is only an ap¬ 
proach ; in other words, of explaining the scholar¬ 
ship of the tongue, the spirit of the speech. 
“ Language,” says the lamented Dr. O. E. 
Vidal, then bishop designate of Sierra Leone, 1 
“ is designed to give expression to thought. 
Hence, by examining the particular class of compo¬ 
sition ”—and, I may add, the grammatical and syn¬ 
tactical niceties characterizing that composition—- 
“ to which any given dialect has been especially 
devoted, we may trace the direction in which the 
current of thought is wont to flow amongst the 
tribe or nations in which it is vernacular, and so 
investigate the principal psychical peculiarities, if 
such there be, of that tribe or nation.” And 
1 “Introductory Remarks to a Vocabulary of the Yoruba 
Language.” Seeleys, Fleet Street, London. 
