square mile. Classified according to religion, Mahomme- dans numbered 337,269; Hindus, 33,832; Sikhs, 1062; Christians, 58, including 39 Europeans; "others," 55. In 1901 the population was 403,072, showing an increase of 8 per cent. The total amount of land revenue and rates was returned as Rs.4,93,138, the incidence of assessment being 3 annas per acre; the number of police was 514. In 1896-97, out of a total cultivated area of 628,734 acres, 166,575 were irrigated, almost entirely from private canals. Salt is quarried on Government account at Kalabagh, and alum is largely obtained in the same neighbourhood. The chief export is wheat. The main line of the North- Western railway, with a branch now in process of extension northwards, runs for 93 miles through the cis-Indus tract; and a military road, 80 miles in length, leads from Bannu town towards Dera Ismail Khan. The Indus, which is nowhere bridged within the district, is navigable for native boats throughout its course of 76 miles. Education is making fair progress. In 1896-97 there were altogether 297 schools attended by 6029 boys, the proportion of boys at recognized schools to those of school-going age being 12 per cent. The death-rate in 1897 was 43 per 1000; the rainfall in 1897 was 20-23 inches.
Banswara, a native state of India, in the Rajputana agency, with an area of 1505 square miles. The population in 1891 was 180,916, showing an average density of 120 persons per square mile. The estimated gross revenue in 1896-97 was Rs.2,53,788; the tribute, Rs.38,000. The administration is in the hands of a Hamdar or minister. The petty state of KUSHALGARH is feudatory to Banswara; area, 432 square miles; popula- tion (1891), 31,353; gross revenue, Rs.61,977. In 1901 the population of the two states was 165,276, showing a decrease of 22 per cent., due to the effects of famine. The town of BANSWARA has a population of about 7500. Bantam, the most western residency of Java, on Bantam Bay, with its chief town of the same name, 45 miles west by north of Batavia. The soil is fertile only in the central portion of the residency, which, from several causes (cattle plague of 1879, fever epidemics, the erup- tion of Krakatao in 1883, causing the death of 24,000 of the inhabitants, and the insurrection of 1888), is less populous and less cultivated than the rest of Java. The industries are rice, coffee, katjang, and fishing. The capital is in a decayed state. The residency (area, 2989 square miles) had, in 1897, a population of 709,339, in- cluding 302 Europeans, 1959 Chinese, 51 Arabs, and 35 other Asiatic foreigners.
Bantry, a seaport in county Cork, Ireland, on Bantry Bay, which is one of the headquarters stations of the Channel Squadron and an important fishing centre. It is the terminal station of the Cork, Bandon, and South Coast Railway. The coaches on the famous Prince of Wales route to Glengariff start from here. The manufac- ture of Irish friezes and tweeds is now successfully carried on; also salmon fishing. Population, about 2900.
The Bantu Languages. The greater part of
Africa south of the equator possesses but one linguistic
family so far as its native inhabitants are concerned. This
clearly-marked division of human speech has been entitled
the Bantu, a name invented by the late Dr Bleek, and or possibly
it is, on the whole, the fittest general term to use to
designate the most remarkable group of African languages.[1]
It must not be supposed for a moment that all the people who speak Bantu languages belong necessarily to a special and definite type of Negro. On the contrary, though there is a certain physical resemblance among those tribes who speak the purest Bantu dialects (the Ba-yanzi of the Upper Congo, the people of the great lakes, the Ova-herero [Damara], Zulu-Kafirs, Awemba, and some of the east coast peoples), there is nevertheless a great diversity in outward appearance, shape of head, and other physical characteristics, among the negroes who inhabit Bantu Africa. Some tribes speaking Bantu dialects are dwarfs or dwarfish, and obviously akin to the non-Bantu Bushmen or Forest Pygmies. Others betray relationship to the Hottentots; others again cannot be distinguished from the most exaggerated forms of the black West African Negro. Yet others again, especially on the north, show traces of Galla or Nilotic intermixture. But the general deduction to be drawn from a study of the Bantu languages as they exist at the present day is that at some period not much more than two thousand years ago a powerful tribe of negroes speaking the Bantu mother language, and allied physically to the negroes of the Western Nile and Southern Lake Chad basins, pushed at that time was probably very sparsely populated except themselves forcibly into the southern half of Africa, which in the north-west, east, and south. The Congo basin at the time of the Bantu invasion would have been occupied centre by Forest Pygmies; the vicinity of Victoria Nyanza on the Atlantic seaboard by west coast negroes, and in the Zanzibar probably had a population partly Nilotic-negro and the East African coast region down to opposite and partly (in the south) Hottentot. From Lakes Tanga- nyika and Nyasa south-westwards to the Cape of Good Hope the population was Hottentot and Bushman. Over that they destroyed or absorbed the vast majority of the nearly all this area the Bantu swept with such a vehemence preceding populations, of which, linguistically speaking, the only survivors are the scattered tribes of pygmies in the forests of the Congo and Gabun, a few patches of quasi - Hottentot and Nilotic peoples between Victoria Nyanza and the Zanzibar coast, and the Bushmen and Hottentots of South-West Africa. The first area of decided concentration on the part of the Bantu was very probably Uganda and the shores of Tanganyika. The main line of advance south-west trended rather to the east coast of Africa than to the west. Finally, when the Bantu had reached the south-west corner of Africa, their further advance was checked by two causes: first, the concentra- tion in a healthy, cattle-bearing part of Africa of the Hottentots (themselves only a superior type of Bushman, but able to offer a much sturdier resistance to the big black Bantu negroes than the crafty but feeble Bushmen), and secondly, the arrival on the scene of the Dutch and British, but for whose final intervention the whole of Southern Africa would have been rapidly Bantuized, as far as the imposition of language was concerned. theory thus briefly set forth of the origin and progress of the Bantu, and the approximate date at which their great table to the present writer only, and has been traversed at southern exodus commenced, is to some extent attribu- different times by other writers on the same subject. In
- ↑ Bantu (literally Ba-ntu) is the most archaic and most widely spread term for "men," "mankind," "people," in these languages. It also indicates aptly the leading feature of this group of tongues, which is the governing of the unchangeable root by prefixes. The syllable -ntu is nowhere found now standing alone, but it originally meant "object," or possible "person." Combined with different prefixes it has different meanings. Thus (in the purer forms of Bantu languages) muntu means "a man," bantu means "men," kintu means "a thing," bintu "things," kantu means "a little thing," tuntu "little things," and so on. This term Bantu has been often criticized by writers, designation for this section of the negro race and of negro languages, such as Sir H. M. Stanley, but no one has supplied a better, simpler and the term has now been definitely consecrated by a use of over forty years.
S. II. 18
