Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/369

 Rh recover tone and health she took a trip to the Canaries, and came back strengthened and full of new ideas and plans, having shown her daring and courage even on this short voyage. In 1893 she started for West Africa, alone, notwithstanding the fears of friends; she knew herself, and felt full of life and hope. Her aims were to collect specimens, principally fish and insects, and to see and know native man away from the haunts of civilization. After some months she returned, with a large collection including many new species, and with much information gathered through difficult journeys and extraordinary adventures, conquered by her cheerful energy. In December, 1894, she went out again to West Africa, exploring many new regions, making close acquaintance with the natives, their customs, laws, and fetish. Here her tact, her sympathy, and fidelity to her word, brought her a rich harvest of knowledge as well as of anthropological specimens. Returning early in 1896 she published the first-fruits of her journeys in Travels in West Africa, 1897, which (though she acknowledged it to be "a word-swamp of a book"), took the world by storm with its racy humour, vivid picturesqueness, and serious feeling. The interest in West Africa was awakened, and she found a new power by means of speech and lecture, which she used in making known the trader and the native, their deeds, their spirit, and their true needs. The Chambers of Commerce recognised her valuable efforts, she was made a member of the Anthropological Institute, and did not spare herself in spreading the truth through many channels, academic, literary, and charitable. Among these may be named the Hibbert Lecture (1897) on "African Religion and Law," and a paper read at the British Association, Bristol, 1898, on "Property among the Peoples of the True Negro Stock." The Folk-Lore Society is indebted to her, not only for her paper on "The Fetish View of the Human Soul" (Folk-Lore, viii., pp. 138-151), read at a meeting in February, 1897, when she exhibited and explained the very interesting collection of folklore objects which she had brought back from West Africa, but also for the valuable introduction to Mr. Dennett's Folklore of the Fjote, and for her ready and inestimable help in seeing that work through the press. In 1899 the important volume West African Studies more carefully elaborated her views on certain points. She also undertook the Story of West Africa (1899), and in the spring of the present year brought out the Memoir of her father (prefixed to Notes on Sport