to know there is some one who cares for facts, without theories draping them.
I will merely add that to all my own West Coast friends I remain indebted; and that if you ever come across any one who says I owe them much, you may take it as a rule that I do, though in all my written stuff I have most carefully ticketed its source.
I now turn to the explanation and apology for this book, briefly. Apology for its literary style I do not make. I am not a literary man, only a student of West Africa. I am not proud of my imperfections in English. I would write better if I could, but I cannot. I find when I try to write like other people that I do not say what seems to me true, and thereby lose all right to say anything; and I am more convinced, the more I know of West Africa—my education is continuous and unbroken by holidays,—that it is a difficult thing to write about, particularly when you are a student hampered on all sides by masses of inchoate material, unaided by a set of great authors to whose opinions you can refer, and addressing a public that is not interested in the things that interest you so keenly and that you regard as so deeply important.
In my previous book I most carefully confined myself to facts and arranged those facts on as thin a line of connecting opinion as possible. I was anxious to see what manner of opinion they would give rise to in the minds of the educated experts up here; not from a mere feminine curiosity, but from a distrust in my own ability to construct theories. On the whole this method has worked well. Ethnologists of different theories have been enabled to use such facts as they saw fit; but one of the greatest of ethnologists has grumbled at me, not for not giving a theory, but for omitting
