governed by its chief and its elders, oftentimes in complete
independence. In occasional instances, however, considerable states of
loose organization were under the rule of central authorities. Such states
were likely to be the creation of invaders from the eastward, the Dahomans
and Ashantees for example; but the kingdom of Benin appears to have arisen
indigenously. In many cases the subordination of conquered villages merely
resulted in their paying annual tribute. As to language, Lower Guinea spoke
multitudinous dialects of the one Bantu tongue, but in Upper Guinea there
were many dialects of many separate languages.

Land was so abundant and so little used industrially that as a rule it
was not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little
occasion to mark the limits of their domains. For travel by land there were
nothing but narrow, rough and tortuous foot-paths, with makeshift bridges
across the smaller streams. The rivers were highly advantageous both as
avenues and as sources of food, for the negroes were expert at canoeing and
fishing.

Intertribal wars were occasional, but a crude comity lessened their
frequency. Thus if a man of one village murdered one of another, the
aggrieved village if too weak to procure direct redress might save its
face by killing someone in a third village, whereupon the third must by
intertribal convention make common cause with the second at once, or else
coerce a fourth into the punitive alliance by applying the same sort of
persuasion that it had just felt. These later killings in the series were
not regarded as murders but as diplomatic overtures. The system was hard
upon those who were sacrificed in its operation, but it kept a check upon
outlawry.

A skin stretched over the section of a hollow tree, and usually so
constructed as to have two tones, made an instrument of extraordinary use
in communication as well as in music. By a system long anticipating the
Morse code the Africans employed this "telegraph drum" in sending
messages from village to village for long distances and with great speed.
Differences of speech were no bar, for the tom tom code was interlingual.
The official drummer could explain by the high and low alternations of his
taps that a deed of violence just done was not a crime but a _pourparler_
for the forming of a league. Every week for three months in 1800 the
tom toms doubtless carried the news throughout Ashantee land that King
Quami