Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Essay on the Progress of African Philology Up to the Year 1893: Prepared for the Congress of the World, at Chicago
I have at different times lectured, and published, on the subject of the Languages of Africa, collectively bringing to a focus all the scattered contributions of Scholars and Missionaries. My knowledge is all secondhand: I am only a compiler. After several Lectures and Essays I at length in 1883 published in London two volumes containing 560 pages, called
"A Sketch of the Modern Languages of Africa." It was only a sketch, and restricted to the Modem Languages of Africa, and therefore excluded all European, Asiatic, and such languages as Egyptian, Koptic, Gruanch, which were dead. One of the most important, and laborious, features of my book, was the Bibliographical Table of Languages, Dialects, Localities, and Authorities: Appendix C p. 467. I had accepted Friederich Mailer's Linguistic Classification into six groups: Semitic, Hamitic, Nuba - Fulah, Negro, Bantu, and Hottentot - Bushman. Nothing in the last ten years has been published to induce me to set aside that Classification. The Ethnologist, who examines the physical features of African races, informs us, that there are two varieties of woolly-haired races: (1) the fleecy haired and (2) the tufted, and there exist also lank curly haired races.
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