It is only when the traveller has a long or close acquaintance with a tribe, that he is able to deal satisfactorily with the vocabulary and structure of their language. To be able to carry on a conversation in broken sentences is not enough, for an actual grammar and dictionary is required to enable philologists to make out the structure and affinities with other languages. It used to be customary to send out English lists of thirty or forty ordinary words to have equivalents put to them in native languages. As every detail of this kind is worth having, these lists cannot be said to be quite worthless, but they go hardly any way toward what is really wanted. They are liable to frequent mistakes, as when the barbarian, from whom the white man is trying to get the term “foot,” answers with a word meaning “my leg,” which is carefully taken down and printed. Such poor vocabularies cannot even be relied on to show whether a language belongs to a particular family, for the very word which seems to prove this may be borrowed. Thus, in various African vocabularies, there appears the word _sapun_ (or something similar) with the meaning of _soap_; but this is a Latin word which has spread far and wide from one country to another, and proves nothing as to original connection between languages which have adopted it. While it is best not to under-rate the difficulty of collecting such information as to a little-known dialect as will be really of service to philology, it must be remembered that travellers still often have opportunities of preserving relics of languages, or at any rate special dialects, which are on the point of dying out unrecorded. Where no proper grammar and dictionary has been compiled, it is often possible to find some European or some interpreter fairly conversant with the language, with whose aid a vocabulary may be written out and sentences analysed grammatically, which, when read over to intelligent natives and criticised by them, may be worked into good linguistic material. It is worth while to pay attention to native names of plants, minerals, &c., as well as of places and persons, for these are often terms carrying significant meaning. Thus _ipecacuanha_ is stated by Martius to be _i-pe-caa-guéne_, which in the Tupi language of Brazil, signifies “the little wayside plant which makes vomit.”