Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/57

Rh obtained in the same manner. These induced some of their relations to join them, and presently a whole Bushman family was living on his ground. From time to time as one party left another arrived, so that the material to work with was always abundant.

To his surprise Dr. Bleek soon found that he was in contact, not with degraded Hottentots or even with people closely allied to Hottentots, but with representatives of an actually primitive race. From that moment he devoted his attention almost entirely to the study of the habits, folklore, and particularly the language of the Bushmen, for their race in South Africa in its purity was almost extinct, and he realised that in a very few years such researches would be no longer possible. In this study he was warmly assisted by his sister-in-law, Miss L. C. Lloyd, who was fortunate in possessing a very sharp ear, and who was soon able to distinguish the different clicks, smacking of the lips, and guttural sounds that form so large a portion of Bushman speech.

A mass of material was collected, but was not ready for publication when, to the great loss of students throughout the world, the death of Dr. Bleek on the 17th of August 1875 put an end to his devoted and most useful labour. His Comparative Grammar of South African Languages is, and must always remain, a standard work, though it too was left incomplete and contains very little upon the Bushman tongue.

Miss Lloyd was then engaged to take charge of the Grey Library until a competent successor to Dr. Bleek could be obtained, and she resolved to continue the Bushman researches out of office hours and gather as much material as she could, before arranging for publication. In all South Africa there was no one so well qualified for the task as she. Not a few European children on farms had in earlier times learned to utter the strange sounds which constitute Bushman speech, and could converse freely with the savages, but none of these had ever been able to commit their knowledge to writing and it had died with them. Miss Lloyd was acquainted with two dialects, was accustomed to take down the sentences as they came from the lips of the speakers,