There is scarcely anything in language so meagrely dealt with by scholars as musical accent. That is particularly the case with such languages as have no so-called etymological tones; but musical accent in “tone languages” has also been most inadequately examined. The reason for this is of course that the student considers himself incapable of clearing up this side of the language he is examining. That it is, however, possible to penetrate very deep into the tone systems of a language without having a sharp ear for music (in the usual sense of the words) is shown in K. E. Laman's The Musical Accent or Intonation in the Kongo Language. This work is undoubtedly a most important attempt to disentangle the musical accents of a tone language, and deserves to be studied by all those who have an interest in such things, not only by Africanists. I do not propose here to give a regular review of it, but as I suppose most readers of this Bulletin do not know Laman's book, I will give a short summary of its contents.