This splendid work is the first fruits of an expedition projected, I gather, in the joint interest of the British Museum and the Musée du Congo Beige. It was composed of Mr. E. Torday, Mr. M. W. Hilton-Simpson, and Mr. Norman H. Hardy, and left England in October, 1907, returning after an absence of nearly two years in September, 1909. The principal tribes visited were the Bushongo, the Basongo Meno, the northern Batetela, the Akela and Bankutu, the Bapende, Bakongo, and Bashilele, all of them occupying portions of the basin of the Kasai and its affluents, the Sankuru, Lukenje, and Loange, between the 19th and 24th parallels of longitude east of Greenwich. The country of the three last-named tribes had never before been penetrated by Europeans. The results now published concern chiefly the Bushongo, among whom the best opportunities for work offered and several months were spent. Notes on the adjacent and related tribes were, however, made as far as practicable, and are included, together with a separate section on the Basongo Meno. It is to be hoped that further information on the Bashilele and Bakongo will soon be obtainable; for these tribes are held by the explorers to be not only related to the Bushongo, but to have been the vanguard of the Bantu immigration into the Kasai basin. Great pains were taken to be assured of the correctness of the information obtained. The explorers were fully alive to the importance of accuracy; and Mr. Torday at least is a field-anthropologist of much experience, who had already given to the world from time to time reports on various tribes of the Congo,—reports much valued by students, and the result of long and painstaking enquiry.
The Bushongo, like most of the western Bantu, reckon kinship exclusively through the mother. If their historical traditions are to be trusted, their chiefs have on several occasions even been
