for the benefit of their health.

My first visit to the Rev. William Walker made me regret my
precipitate trip to Mbata: he told me what I now knew, that it
was the wrong line, and that I should have run two or three days
up the Rembwe, the first large influent on the southern bank of
the Gaboon. He had come out to the River in 1842, and had spent
twenty years of his life in Africa, with occasional furloughs
home. He greatly interested me by a work which he was preparing.
The Gaboon Mission had begun its studies of the many native
dialects by the usual preparatory process of writing grammars and
vocabularies; after this they had published sundry fragmentary
translations of the Scriptures, and now they aimed at something
higher. After spending years in building and decorating the
porticoes of language, they were ambitious of raising the edifice
to which it is only an approach; in other words, of explaining
the scholarship of the tongue, the spirit of the speech.

"Language," says the lamented Dr. O.E. Vidal, then bishop
designate of Sierra Leone,[FN#19] "is designed to give expression
to thought. Hence, by examining the particular class of
composition"--and, I may add, the grammatical and syntactical
niceties characterizing that composition--"to which any given
dialect has been especially devoted, we may trace the direction
in which the current of thought is wont to flow amongst the tribe
or nations in which it is vernacular, and so investigate the
principal psychical peculiarities, if such there be, of that
tribe or nation." And again he remarks: "Dr. Krap was unable to
find any word expressing the idea of gratitude in the language of
all the Suaheli (Wasawahili) tribes; a fact significant enough as