ings of exquisite beauty.

25. _Uchoreus_, one of the successors of Osymandyas, built the city of
Memphis. This city was 150 furlongs, or more than seven leagues in
circumference, and stood at the point of the Delta, in that part where
the Nile divides itself into several branches or streams. A city so
advantageously situated, and so strongly fortified, became soon the
usual residence of the Egyptian kings.

26. _Thethmosis_ or _Amosis_, having expelled the Shepherd kings,
reigned in Lower Egypt.[645]

FOOTNOTES:

[645] Rollin, vol. i. pp. 129-147.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VIII.

AFRICAN LANGUAGES.

In the language of the Kafirs, for example, not only the cases but the
numbers and genders of nouns are formed entirely by prefixes,
analogous to articles. The prefixes vary according to number, gender
and case, while the nouns remain unaltered except by a merely euphonic
change of the initial letters. Thus, in Coptic, from _sheri_, a son,
comes the plural _neu-sheri_, the sons; from _sori_, accusation,
_hau-sori_, accusations. Analogous to this we have in the Kafir _ama_
marking the plural, as _amakosah_ the plural of _kosah_, _amahashe_
the plural of _ihashe_, _insana_ the plural of _usana_. The Kafir has
a great variety of similar prefixes; they are equally numerous in the
language of Kongo, in which, as in the Coptic and the Kafir, the
genders, numbers, and cases of nouns are almost solely distinguished
by similar prefixes.

"The Kafir language is distinguished by one peculiarity which
immediately strikes a student whose views of language have been formed
upon the examples afforded by the inflected languages of ancient and
modern Europe. With the exception of a change of termination in the
ablative case of the noun, and five changes of which the verb is
susceptible in its principal tenses, the whole business of declension,
conjugation, &c., is carried on by prefixes, and by the changes which
take place in the initial letters or syllables of words subjected to
grammatical government."[646]

Resources are not yet in existence for instituting a general
comparison of the languages of Africa. Many years will probably elapse
before it will be possible to produce such an analysis of these
languages, investigated in their grammatical structure, as it is
desirable to possess, or even to compare them by extensive collections
of well-arranged vocabularies, after the manner of Klaproth's A