The base of Kisawahili is distinctly African; and, totally unlike its limitrophe the Galla, it grammatically ignores the Semitic element. It is now time for writers to unlearn that, ‘all the languages over the face of the earth, however remotely different and however widely spread, appear to be all reducible to the one or the other of three radically distinct tongues’ (Dr Beke, p. 352, Appendix to Jacob’s Flight. London, Longmans, 1865).[109] It is only, I believe, the monogenist pure and simple who in these days would assert ‘there exist three linguistic types, as there are three physical types, the black, the yellow, and the white’ (M. de Quatrefages, p. 31, Anthropological Review, No. xxviii.). To the old and obsolete triad of Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan, or Turanian, Semitic, and Iranian, we must now add at least another pair— without noticing the Asianesian—namely, the American or Sentence language, and the prefixitive South African family. These two great tongues, one extending over half a world, the other through half a continent, are, I believe with Lichtenstein and Marsden, unborrowed, indigenous, and marked with all the peculiarities which distinguish their inventors. Both are idioms which seem to indicate nice linguistic perceptions and high intellectual development; history, however, supplies many cases of civilization simplifying and curtailing the complicated tongues of barbarians, thus making language the means, not the end, of instruction. The limits of the South African family may be roughly laid down as extending from the Equator to the Cape of Good Hope. The Equatorial Gaboon on the Western Coast[110] evidently belongs to it; and upon the Congo river I found that whole sentences of Kisawahili were easily made intelligible to the people.[111] Though the language is evidently one in point of construction throughout this immense area, isolation and hostilities between tribes have split it into a multitude of dialects. Almost every people, at the distance of 30 to 50 miles, has its peculiar speech, and in these regions it would not be difficult to collect ‘Specimens of a hundred African Languages.’ The older travellers remarked that the Tower of Babel must have been near the Gulf of Guinea; they would have found the same throughout the interior and Eastern Coast.