The Padrdo and Pinda . 
79 
in his text, and mulundu in his vocabulary, is not 
singular, as he supposes, but the plural of loondu , a 
mountain” (p. 200 of the “ Review”). Firstly, 
Douville has warned the reader that the former is 
the spelling best adapted to French, the latter to 
Portuguese. Secondly, “ mulundu ” in Angolan is 
singular, the plural being “milundu”—a handful, 
the Persians say, is a specimen of the heap. The 
excess of female births in low and unhealthy 
places (1, 309) and as the normal result of poly¬ 
gamy (3, 243), is a highly interesting subject still 
awaiting investigation. I do not mean that Dou¬ 
ville was the first to observe this phenomenon, 
which forced itself upon the notice of physiologists 
in ancient times. Foster (“Cook’s Third Voyage”) 
remarks that, wherever men and animals have 
many females, the feminine births preponderate 
over the masculine ; a fact there explained by the 
“ organic molecule ” of Buffon. Pigafetta, the 
circumnavigator, gives the King of Tidor eighteen 
daughters to eight sons. 
The French traveller does not pretend to be a 
mineralogist, but he does his best to lay open the 
metallic riches of the country; he gives careful 
observations of temperature, in water as well as 
air, he divines the different proportions of oxygen 
in the atmosphere, and he even applies himself to 
investigating the comparative heat of the negro’s 
blood, an inquiry still far from being exhausted. 
