About the middle of the last century, an English marine officer, F. E. Forbes, caused a sensation among his contemporaries by the report that he had discovered an indigenous script in use among the Vai people of West Africa. The question immediately arose how these natives, hitherto hardly known even by name to the civilized world, and pursuing an unobtrusive existence in the seclusion of the primeval forest far from the course of the world's traffic, came to possess a cultural treasure of so high a quality, one usually met with only among peoples of ancient and rich culture. Little wonder then, that in the years that followed, the solution of this problem occupied the attention of a number of European scholars.