vowel sounds." But I found the negative past, present, and future
forms of verbs wholly dependent upon a change of accent, or
rather of intonation or voice-pitch, which the stranger's ear,
unless acute, will fail to detect. For instance, Mi Taund would
mean "I love;" Mi taunda, "I do not love." The reverend linguist
also asserts that it is almost entirely free from guttural and
nasal sounds; the latter appeared to me as numerous and
complicated as in the Sanskrit. Mr. Wilson could hardly have had
a nice ear, or he would not have written Nchigo "Ntyege," or
Njina "Engena," which gives a thoroughly un-African distinctness
to the initial consonant.

The adjectival form is archaically expressed by a second and
abstract substantive. This peculiarity is common in the South
African family, as in Ashanti; but, as Bowdich observes, we also
find it in Greek, e.g. , "heresies of
destruction" for destructive. Another notable characteristic is
the Mpongwe's fondness for the passive voice, never using, if
possible, the active; for instance, instead of saying, "He was
born thus," he prefers, "The birth that was thus borned by him."
The dialect changes the final as well as the initial syllable, a
process unknown to the purest types of the South African family.
As we advance north we find this phenomenon ever increasing; for
instance in Fernando Po; but the Mpongwe limits the change to
verbs.

Another distinguishing point of these three Gaboon tongues, as
the Rev. Mr. Mackey observes, is "the surprizing flexibility of
the verb, the almost endless variety of parts regularly derived
from a single root. There are, perhaps, no other languages in the