I will only add a few words relative to the spelling of native names,—rather a difficult subject in a conflux of languages of very different organization and unsettled orthography. I have constantly endeavoured to express the sounds as correctly as possible, but in the simplest way, assigning to the vowels always the same intonation which they have in Italian, and keeping as closely as possible to the principles adopted by the Asiatic Society. The greatest difficulty related to the “g” sound, which is written in various ways by the Africans, and puzzled even the Arabic writers of the middle ages. While the “k” in North Africa approaches the g in “give,” it takes the sound of it entirely in the Central African languages. On this ground, although I preferred writing “Azkár,” while the name might have been almost as well written “Azgár;” yet further into the interior the application of the g, as in “Ágades,” “Góber,” and so on, was more correct. The ع of the Arabs has been expressed, in conformity with the various sounds which it adopts, by ʿa, ʿo and ʿu; the غ by gh, although it sounds in many words like an r; ج by j; the چ, which is frequent in the African languages, by ch. The alphabet, therefore, which I have made use of is the following:— _Vowels._ a as in cat. á ” father. ʿa (not English) not unlike a in dart. e as in pen. é like the first a in fatal. i as in it. í ” ravine. o ” lot. ó ” home. ʿo (not English) not unlike o in noble. u as in put. ú ” adjure, true. ʿu not unlike oo in doom. y, at the end of words, instead of i. _Diphthongs._ ai as i in tide (ay at the end of words). oi (oy), as in noise. au (aw), as ow in now. _Consonants._ b as in beat. d ” door. f ” fan.[2] g ” got. j ” join.[3] k ” keep. l ” leave. m ” man. n ” not. ñ ” the Spanish “campaña,” like ni in companion, onion. p ” pain.[2] r ” rain. s ” son. t ” tame. v ” vain. w ” win. y ” yet. z ” zeal. _Double Consonants._ gh as in ghost, and the g in grumble. ks as x in tax, excise. kh as ch in the Scotch word loch. th as in tooth. ts as in Betsy. ng as in wrong. HENRY BARTH, PH.D. ST. JOHN’S WOOD, LONDON, _May 1, 1857_. =Transcriber’s Note:= The author’s orthography is not always consistent. Accents, spelling, hyphenation etc in his transcriptions of the languages of Africa have been retained as printed, except in the Index, where, if a spelling was used that appeared nowhere else in the book, the assumption has been made that the form in the main text is the correct one and the index entry has been changed to match that. Some obvious printer errors in English words have been corrected. CONTENTS.