THE BOER STATES

Keane was at time late Vice-President of the Anthropological Institute.

xx + 313 pages. In red cloth with gilt title to the spine. Foxing to pages edges. The page edges uncut. Fold-out map in colour in front. A good copy.

The author, in referring to the "subtlety" of the Boer temperament, remarks that "this factor..... has to be steadily borne in mind ...... as a cue to forming a just estimate of their deeds and misdeeds.......  Theirs is a low grade of culture, in contending with which, peoples endowed with a higher moral sense are often heavily handicapped. It is stated that in order to endeavour to understand the complex nature of the people, their 'racial beginning' should be studied, and their development in the Cape region, after the landing of the raw metarial - Dutch, French, German - which went to their making," carefully followed up.

The second and third chapters deal with the Orange Free State and the Transvaal from various points of view, and afford considerable information respecting the Republics. The different groups of the Bantu tribes south of the Zambesi are carefully described, and it is maintained that the Ovaherero and Ovampo are of Bantu stock, while the "Hill Damaras" appear to be of Bantu race with a considerable strain of Hottentot blood.

Considerable attention has been devoted to the Taal, and this patios is characterised as "a rugged but forcible tongue, full of terse and happy idiomatic expressions," a description which probably supplies the answer to the author's inquiry as to the causes by which it has gained "such an apparently easy triumph not only over its French and German rivals. but even to the literary and official language of Holland itself." (Mendelssohn's volume 1 page 806)