For the Mandingo tribes, when we use the term in a general sense, the most convenient classification is into the _Mahometan_ and the _Pagan_. That this division should exist is natural; since, with the exception of the Wolofs, the Mandingos are the most northern of all the western Negroes, and, consequently, those who are most in contact with the Mahometan Arabs, and the equally Mahometan Kabyles of Barbary and the Great Desert,--a fact sufficient to account for the monotheistic creeds of the northern tribes. As for the Paganism of the others, we must remember how far southwards and inland the same great stock extends--indefinitely towards the interior, and as far as the back of the Ashanti country, in the direction of the equator. This prepares us for finding Mandingos at our next settlement. _Sierra Leone._--The native populations which encircle this settlement are two--the _Timmani_ towards the north, and _Bullom_ towards the south. Both are Negroes of the most typical kind, in respect to their physical conformation. Both are Pagans. Both speak what seem to be mutually unintelligible languages, but which have an undoubted relationship to each other, and to the numerous Mandingo dialects as well. It is this which induces me to place them in the same section with the more civilized Africans of the Gambia. It is safe to say that they are amongst the rudest members of the stock; indeed it is only in the eyes of the etymologist that they are Mandingo at all. Practically, they, and several tribes like them, are Mandingo, in the way that a wolf is a dog, or a goat a sheep. The Bullom and Timmani are the frontagers to Sierra Leone; and it was with Bullom and Timmani potentates that the land of the settlement was bargained for. The settlers themselves are of different origin. Mixed beyond all other populations of Africa, the occupants of Free Town are in the same category with the Negroes of Jamaica and St. Domingo; concerning whom we can only predicate that they have dark skins, and that they come from Africa. The analysis of their several origins, and their distribution amongst the separate branches of the African family, would be one of the most difficult feats in minute ethnology; and this would be but a fraction of the investigation. When the several countries which supplied the several victims of the slave-trade had been ascertained, the complicated question of _intermixture_ would stand over; and there we should find lineages of every degree of hybridism--children, whose ancestors originated on different sides of Africa, themselves the parents of a lighter-coloured offspring, the effect of European intercourse.