From whatever direction the negro entered Africa—if he did not arise there—he seems to have settled most thickly to the north of the Equator, in that broad belt below the 15th degree of north latitude which stretches across the continent from Senegal and Liberia to Abyssinia and the Victoria Nyanza. In the great western prolongation of Africa, above all, between Kordofan and Senegambia, especially in Nigeria, the negro must have been established for many thousand years to permit of the enormous variety and diversity of the languages therein spoken having arisen. In some parts of West Africa, such as Liberia and French Guinea, there are six or seven absolutely distinct language-families, some of which are confined in their use to an area no larger than Rutland or Bedfordshire. On the other hand, over the great southern third of Africa, beyond the Equator, there are at most only eleven distinct language-families (as compared to the forty-two or forty-three farther north). Of these eleven, one, the Bantu, predominates vastly over the others; which others are the Bushman and Hottentot in the extreme south, three unclassified Sudanese language-families in Northern Congoland, three small patches of non-Bantu speech in Northern German East Africa, and in the same region and in British East Africa the intrusive Nilotic and Hamitic speech-groups. At the present day nearly all Africa south of the Equator is the domain of but one language-family, the Bantu. The other negro languages are fast dying out. The Bantu conquest has all the appearance of having been a recent event, not beginning perhaps more than 2500 years ago. The Bantu language-family is distinguished by its use of distinctive prefixes, to which correspond a concord of pronouns and adjectival prefixes. Nouns are divided into a number of classes (say seventeen), and each class is marked by a special prefix and concord. But the classes do not correspond to the masculine and feminine of the sex-denoting languages, or masculine, feminine, and neuter. No discrimination in prefix or pronouns takes place to indicate sex; but nouns are allotted arbitrarily to classes which in most cases have lost any special meaning but originally undoubtedly corresponded with a division of objects into natural categories, each distinguished by some special feature. Thus there was the ‘living’ or ‘human’ class, the ‘tree’ class, the ‘long’ or ‘river’ class, the classes of diminutive objects, of ‘gigantic,’ of collective like ‘water’ and ‘tribe,’ of ‘strong’ and ‘weak.’