that though the Bantu types are not at present as fully developed in point of simplicity and preciseness as are the main languages of Europe they are, nevertheless, by reason of their peculiar genius, capable of being rapidly developed into as perfect a means for the expression of human thought as any of the European types of speech; they are astonishingly rich in verbs which make it easy to express motion and action clearly and vividly; the impersonal, or abstract article "it" is used exactly as in European languages, and the particular prefix provided in some of the Bantu types for the class of nouns which represent abstract conceptions makes it possible to increase the vocabularies in that direction ad infinitum. The Bantu types are not so-called holophrastic forms of primitive speech in which the compounding of expressions is said to take the place of the conveyance of ideas,

nor are they made up of onomatopoetic, or interjectional expressions, if indeed such languages exist anywhere outside the heads of the half-informed. They are languages equal in potential capacity to any included in the main Indo-European group. Even now in their comparatively undeveloped state these languages are capable of expressing the subtleties of early philosophical speculation. I would not, for instance, feel daunted if I were set the task of translating into any of these main types, say, the dialectics of Socrates. To do this I would first reduce the more complex terms to such simple and common Anglo-Saxon words as when built together would give the same meaning, and then translate these into their Bantu equivalents. The substitution of Anglo-Saxon words for those of modern English would, no doubt, involve a good deal of repetition but the sense would be adequately rendered. I would proceed in the same way as the early teachers and writers who had to build up the language they used as they went along. The English indeed, have not built up their world-wide speech with their own materials but have,

with characteristic acquisitiveness taken the combinations they wanted, ready made, mainly from Greek, Latin and French. How far and how well a Native would understand my presentation of metaphysical speculation would depend upon the degree of familiarity he might have acquired, through Missionary teaching or otherwise, with abstract notions in general. In my opinion the average "raw" Native would understand as well and as much as the average uneducated European peasant. Both would probably find my disquisition "sad stuff"; both would require time for that repetition of the words which is necessary to familiarise the mind with the unaccustomed ideas they represent; in both cases one would have to "give them the words that the ideas may come." A single illustration will show my meaning. When the first Missionaries rendered the word "soul" into Zulu by the word signifying "breath" in that language they simply followed the example of their predecessors of antiquity who employed the Latin spiritus, which also means "breath," for the same purpose, namely, to convey to their hearers the idea of a breath-like or

ethereal something housed in, but separable from, the human body.

"The essence of language," said Aristotle, "is that it should be clear and not mean." The raw Bantu material is ample for compliance with this demand, and the process of development will not be as protracted as in early Europe for it may be accomplished here, largely, by the simple means of translating the words already thought out and provided in the white man's language. In so far, then, as we attempt to measure the mentality of the Natives by their language we find that they cannot be relegated to a lower plane than that occupied by the uneducated peasantry of Europe of a few decades ago.

Most people are prepared to believe that the primary psychical processes are identical in all races, but many still profess to see a difference in favour of the white man in what they call the higher faculties of the mind. But the much-abused word "faculty" no longer bears the meaning given to it by Locke and his followers who propounded a limitless brood or set of faculties to correspond with every process discoverable by introspection as taking place in the mind. In

modern psychology the word means simply a capacity for an ultimate, irreducible, or unanalysable mode of thinking of, or being conscious of, objects. Perception, for instance, is looked upon as the capacity for thinking of a thing immediately at hand, and memory as a capacity for thinking again of a certain material or abstract object. The mental power of abstraction is no longer considered as a sort of separate function of the mind but is regarded as the capacity for thinking of, say, whiteness as apart from any particular white patch. But the notion that the white man is endowed with a set of finer feelings and with special and higher powers of abstraction than is the African Native is so generally entertained that it will be convenient to make the necessary comparisons in, more or less, the commonly accepted terms.

Those who look upon the Native as being in every way a more primitive being than the European will naturally be disposed to believe that he is more a creature of instincts than a man of reason, and they will expect him to move in dependence upon certain fundamental intuitions where the

European goes guided by reason alone. I have found no evidence whatever to support this supposition.

The elementry instinct of self-preservation is no stronger in the Native than in the white man. Suicide is not at all uncommon among the Bantu. I have seen many instances of Natives who have shown a calm and philosophical disregard of death where life has seemed no longer desirable. This pre-eminently human prerogative—for no animal can rise to the conscious and deliberate destruction of itself—has often been exercised, as I have seen, by Natives in their sound and sober senses so as to preclude entirely that suggestion of temporary insanity which is so commonly accepted at coroner's inquests in England and elsewhere.

The instinct of direction, the "bump of locality" as it is generally called, varies with the Natives as it does among the whites, and is no keener in the individual Native than in the individual white man. All the hunters and travellers I have met have confirmed the opinion I have myself formed from personal experience that by training his ordinary powers of observation and thereby developing

his sense of locality and direction the average European is able, after a comparatively short time, to find his way in difficult country as well as the Natives, while some European hunters who have dispensed with Native guides and trackers have acquired the art of tracking game so well that they surpass even the local Natives themselves. "Veld-craft" is simply a matter of training the ordinary faculties of observation and memory for particular purposes, and the Native shows no such superiority in this respect as would naturally be expected from him if he were indeed better provided with animal instincts than the more civilised white man.

The sexual instincts of the Natives seem in no wise different from those of other people. The African male, like the European male, is generally more amative than the female who is always more philoprogenitive than the man. But the notion is common that the Native male is more bestial when sexually excited than the white man in similar case, and this is taken to account for the fact that he is so often found guilty of crimes of violence against females of his own colour, and sometimes even against European women.

It must be borne in mind that before the white man came the Natives, like the peasants in many European countries not long ago, conducted their courtship and love-making with a show of violence which seemed to them right and proper. The idea, indeed, that any self-respecting Native girl could yield herself to a lover without, at