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LANGUAGES OF AFRICA.
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same time general principles which affect the highest interests of the science of language. While most comparative philologists just now are absorbed in minutiae concerning the character and possible dialectic varieties of single vowels and consonants, Professor Lepsius draws in bold strokes the broad outlines of a history of language running through 4000 or 5000 years, and covering the whole continent of Africa and the neighbouring coast of Asia. As the admirers of Gerard Douw shake their heads at the vast canvas covered by Paolo Veronese, we can well understand that scholars engaged in the question whether the Aryan language possessed originally four or five different a's should turn away with a kind of shudder from pages in which languages which share hardly one single word in common, and agree grammatically in nothing but the fact that they distinguish the two genders of nouns are classed as of common origin. Fortunately, there is room both for Gerard Douws and Paolo Veroneses in the science of language; nay, in the interest of that science it is sincerely to be wished that both styles should always be cultivated side by side. There is plenty of rough work to be done among the unexplored languages of the world, and for that work the keen, far-reaching eye of the hunter is far more essential than the concentrated intensity of the linguistic microscopist.
While the latest researches in African philology had tended to the admission of an ever-increasing number of independent families of speech, Professor Lepsius, in a true Darwinian spirit, starts from the fundamental principle that there is but one aboriginal African language, and that the large number of local dialects scattered over the African continent is due to development, to a struggle for life against foreign intruders and the survival of the fittest. Before he attempts to establish this fact he bas first to clear the ground of a number of what he considers prejudices which impede the progress both of linguistic and anthropological research.
