e, behind Bear
Island, near the mouth of the bay. It was the scene of attempts by the
French to invade Ireland in 1689 and 1796, and troops of William of Orange
were landed here in 1697. There are several islands, the principal of which
are Bear Island and Whiddy, off the town. Ruins of the so-called "fish
palaces" testify to the failure of the pilchard fishery in the 18th
century.

BANTU LANGUAGES. The greater part of Africa south of the equator possesses
but one linguistic family so far as its native inhabitants are concerned.
This clearly-marked division of human speech has been entitled the Bantu, a
name invented by Dr W. H. I. Bleek, and it is, on the whole, the fittest
general term with which to designate the most remarkable group of African
languages.[1]

It must not be supposed for a moment that all the people who speak Bantu
languages belong necessarily to a special and definite type of negro. On
the contrary, though there is a certain physical resemblance among those
tribes who speak clearly-marked Bantu dialects (the Babangi of the upper
Congo, the people of the Great Lakes, the Ova-herero, the Ba-tonga,
Zulu-Kaffirs, Awemba and some of the East Coast tribes), there is
nevertheless a great diversity in outward appearance, shape of head and
other physical characteristics, among the negroes who inhabit Bantu Africa.
Some tribes speaking Bantu languages are dwarfs or dwarfish, and belong to
the group of Forest Pygmies. Others betray relationship to the Hottentots;
others again cannot be distinguished from the most exaggerated types of the
black West African negro. Yet others again, especially on the north, are of
Gala (Galla) or Nilotic origin. But the general deduction to be drawn from
a study of the Bantu languages, as they exist at the present day, is that
at some period not more than 3000 years ago a powerful tribe of negroes
speaking the Bantu mother-language, allied physically to the negroes of the
south-western Nile and southern Lake Chad basins (yet impregnated with the
Caucasian Hamite), pushed themselves forcibly from the very heart of Africa
(the region between the watersheds of the Shari, Congo and western Nile)
into the southern half of the continent, which at that time was probably
sparsely populated except in the north-west, east and south. The Congo
basin and the south-western watershed of the Nile at the time of the Bantu
invasion would have been occupied on the Atlantic seaboard by West Coast