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NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
This is an enormous undertaking, and Professor Lepsius would probably be the first to admit that, in the present imperfect state of our knowledge of many of these languages, his views are liable in the future to considerable modification. Still, as an attempt to show how much change is possible in a language without making it lose its own identity, his remarks deserve very careful consideration. The problem which he has discussed is of fundamental importance, and nowhere, perhaps, could it have been watched and tested to greater advantage than in the conflict between the Bântu and Hamitic families of speech, which differ from each other in many of the most essential points of grammatical articulation. To mention only a few, the Bântu languages are prefixing, the Hamitic suffixing, showing different angles of mental vision which it would seem impossible to bring together into the same focus. Bântu grammar admits of no gender, or, we should rather saysof no gender to denote sex; Hamitic grammar does. On this Professor Lepsius, following in the main the late Dr. Bleek, lays great stress, and he expresses his strong belief in an original Turanianism (p. xxiv.), out of which the Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic families of speech arose, all retaining the common feature of marking the feminine by a suffix, which in the Hamitic and Semitic families is the same, the 't,' while the Japhetic family replaced it by a variety of new terminations. What Professor Lepsius attempts to show is that the traces of gender or suffixes, and other grammatical features quite repugnant to the genius of the Bântu languages, can be explained by the greater or lesser amount of contact of the original African race with Hamitic and, min some cases, with Semitic neighbours. Even when every distinctive feature seems to be erased, Professor Lepsius is not disheartened, and he marks the foreign character of a new grammatical expedient with the same confidence with which an archæologist discovers the restored portions of an ancient
