Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/681

Rh a good meal." This, however, is mere conjecture, for the word papa in the same song, if not French, is the Tshi adjective "good," and not Ewe at all; while the words Héron mande defy solution. Maignan, or magnan, an epithet of the võdu, may be a corruption of amãga, "the old, the venerated," or even of Dãnh-gbi itself. I have seen a corruption nearly as bad; that of the Tshi nyan-kupoñ, to accompong, in Jamaica, for instance. These are, however, evidently words belonging to other languages now mixed up with the võdu cult in Louisiana. One such is wongah, used in Louisiana to mean a võdu charm, and which is most probably the Gã term wong, "a charm." The words in the song Dé-zab, at page 827, appear to be Tshi, but I should never have been able to identify them without the translation, "Out from under the trees our boat moves into the open water." By its means, however, "Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi. Koonoo wi wi momzah," may be taken to be really ''Des arbres, des arbres, de canoe wiwi. Canoe iviwi miombah''—"From the trees, from the trees, the canoe, stealthily. (In the) canoe, stealthily, let us come." The word rozah is unintelligible; in the Tshi language there are no words commencing with r, or with that letter with which r is so frequently interchangeable, l. It would be, however, mere waste of time to look further into this jargon, in which French, Ewe, Effon, Tshi, and Ga words are certainly—and Yomba, Ibo, and Congoese words most probably—indiscriminately mixed together, and so distorted as to render positive recognition almost hopeless.



N The Popular Science Monthly of June, 1890, page 253, there appeared an article entitled Natural and Artificial Cements, by Prof. La Roy F. Griffin, in which theories were advanced in regard to the setting of cement which are at variance with the chemical reactions that are known to take place. There were also given the results of some cement tests, with deductions from the same, that not only are contrary to the results obtained by other experimenters, but are also contrary to the results obtained from the use of cements in works of construction. That there are so many points in Prof. Griffin's article to which exception must be taken, and the exceedingly false impression his article would leave upon the public as to the relative value of 