GOVERNMENT AND LANGUAGE. 217 game, which is a very complicated one, and requiring a considerable amount of calculation, consists in trying to get all the stones of the opposite player. They redistribute their stones in turn, and on stopping at a hole may, under certain conditions, take their opponent's stones out of the two holes opposite.

It is a most fascinating game, and the Waganda will sit for hours over the mweso board. It is probably not a native game, but introduced from the East Coast, where a somewhat similar game, called " bao," is played by the Arabs and Waswahili.

The children in Uganda, as everywhere in the world, may be seen playing games in imitation of the doings of their elders, and making mud-pies by the roadside.

The language of Uganda, or Luganda, as it is called by the natives of the country, belongs to, what Dr. Bleek calls, the Zangian genus of the middle branch of the Bantu languages. By the term Bantu is meant that great family of African languages, extending from the Cape of Good Hope, where it is represented by the Kafir tongue and its dialects, through Eastern and Central Africa to the Equator and to the West Coast near Sierra Leone, where the Bullom and Timneh languages are allied to the Kafir.

Next to the South African members of the great family, the best-studied language is the Kiswahili, spoken on the East Coast about Zanzibar from the Somali coast almost to Natal. This Kiswahili is the