There are two methods by which facts concerning the unrecorded past of a language may be recovered. The first may be labelled the external method. By confrontation with comparable facts of other languages to which it is related, we may reconstruct in some measure the past of a particular language. This is the familiar comparative method. Sometimes, however, another procedure, that of internal reconstruction, may be applied, independently or as a supplement to the comparative method. The facts of the language as described at a given time suggest certain hypotheses regarding its own past. The present study involves a combination of these two methods. An interpretation strongly suggested by the Masai language in its present form receives further confirmation and elucidation by the subsequent application of the comparative method.

This paper may be taken as an essay in the application of anthropological theory to other fields, in this case history. In it I am concerned to give a detailed account of a marriage arrangement that bound together the royal family of Akwamu and the ruling house of the Otublohum quarter of Accra. Akwamu, now a small state locked in the wooded hills of the Volta Gorge in south-east Ghana, was, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the strongest of all the Akan powers and centre of an empire that extended for about 250 miles along the Gold and Slave Coasts of Guinea. Accra, now the capital of Ghana, was incorporated within that empire by conquest in 1681, but recovered its independence half a century later. Unquestionably a whole series of historical events involving Akwamu and Accra would be quite incomprehensible without reference to the structural implications of the marriage arrangement linking the two. The arrangement persisted through four generations, spanning the greater part of the eighteenth century. Fortunately the period is a well-documented one. The archives of the Dutch West Indies Company are especially useful. In particular, sufficient genealogical detail is recorded in the various sources for the marriage arrangement to be recognized as involving successive patrilateral cross-cousin unions.

In this article I analyse Somali political institutions in terms of clanship (tol) and contract (heer). By the latter term I mean the explicit contracts, or treaties of government, which are the foundation of all formal political units among the northern pastoral Somali. In conclusion, I examine the significance of Somali political structure in the light of Maine's celebrated dictum that the ‘movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract’.

Mrs. Eva Meyerowitz's book, entitled The Akan of Ghana, is the third of a four-volume work on the Ashanti and their neighbours. The first to appear was The Sacred State of the Akan (1951), the second Akan Traditions of Origin (1952), and the fourth, not yet published, is to be entitled The Akan Divine Kingship and its Prototype in Ancient Egypt. They are the fruit of Mrs. Meyerowitz's researches in Ghana which began in 1943 when, as Art Supervisor at Achimota College, she was commissioned by the Burlington Magazine to write a series of articles on Ashanti gold ornaments. Since then she has engaged in field research among the Akan-speaking peoples, which has been supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute, by the Colonial Research Council, and, in her latest studies, by the University College of Ghana.

The effects of major changes in the social system on the mental state of individuals have been the subject of a recent controversy. Miss Ward (1956), in a paper discussing the significance of an alleged increase in the number of witch-finding cults in Ashanti, argued that this can be taken as evidence of a widespread rise in the general level of anxiety resulting from rapid structural changes. In a subsequent rejoinder Goody (1957) challenged not only the view that such cults have in fact become more numerous, but also the underlying assumption, shared by many social scientists, that rapid social change produces an emotional malaise in the people caught up in it.

Of recent years many mosques have been built in Sierra Leone, while in Freetown itself the number and character of these new buildings is transforming the Eastern Ward into a visibly Islamic city. Several of the new Freetown mosques are alike in their ambitious scale, their architectural style, and in being associated with a particular sponsoring tribe. The older mosques, even the two or three which were built of permanent materials, were small in scale, had but few architectural pretensions, and were communal rather than tribal in character. The new mosques—the Temne, the Mandinka, the Fula, and the Hausa—are all very large and advertise the ecclesiastical architecture of the Near East; a particular tribe was responsible for the building of each, and the tribal vernaculars are—except in the case of the Mandinka—either being used already within them, or about to be introduced. Moreover, the process is obviously continuing. The foundation-stone has been laid of a Limba mosque; land has been acquired and collections are being taken for a Mende mosque, and both are intended to be large buildings in the new style. Finally, a small Susumosque, scarcely finished as yet, is reported to be destined for demolition in order that it may be replaced by a more handsome structure.