The Arab scholar Ibn Batuta, who travelled in the Sudan in the fourteenth century, speaks in his report of the country of Gobar, the Gobir of to-day. Gobir must at that time have been one of the important centres of Hausaland, for again Leo Africanus, a Berber born in Granada, and a great African traveller, whose book was published in Latin in 1556, mentions the language of Gobir, which is Hausa, and which, according to him, was even then one of the most important languages in the Sudan. This is still so to-day. Hausa, from being the language of very active and very far-travelling traders, has a radiation hardly inferior to that of any other African language. Hausa merchants are to be found in all the important places in the West Central Sudan between the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, in the oases of the great desert, and even in the Eastern Sudan and on the Red Sea: it has for centuries been a real lingua franca. It is therefore natural that the language should have come early to the notice of European travellers and scholars. In 1812, Adelung and Vater published their Mithridates, which contains among other subjects a collection of African vocabularies; in these is found on page 153 a list of ‘Afnu and Kashne’ words. Afnu is a designation of the Hausa people and Kashne is Katsina. From this time on a large number of English and German, and to a smaller extent of French, travellers, missionaries, and linguists have contributed to the exploration of the language and to its literature. There is an abundance of grammars, vocabularies, dictionaries; also a considerable amount of translation work has been done, of which Dr. Miller's translation of the Bible is the most important. The language had become literary even before the advent of the European: through Islam the Arabic script had become known, and it was soon used by learned Hausa malams to write theirown language. This art is not extinct to-day, and manuscripts on various subjects—mostly history, religion, poetry, and folk-lore, are stored in European libraries and in private libraries of native Hausa scholars.