DISABILITY, a term used in law to denote an incapacity in certain persons or classes of persons for the full enjoyment of duties or privileges. Thus, persons under age, insane persons, convicted felons are under disability to do certain legal acts. This disability may be absolute or relative. In the latter case (e.g., drunken or insane persons) the incapable person cannot rely on his condition if it was unknown to his co-contractor at the time the alleged obligation was contracted.
(fi. 138o-142o), a French traveller, as far as is known the first European to see the river Niger. He was a nobleman of Languedoc and had a château near Toulouse. He was fond of travel and natural history and was a man of letters. He had made various journeys before in 1402 he set out on his principal expedition, which brought him in 1405 to Gao, then a flourishing city on the Niger 400m. below Timbuktu. There he married Salam Casais, a Songhai princess—a Muslim negress. In 1413 he returned to Toulouse, having crossed the Sahara to Tunisia and in the Mediterranean narrowly escaped capture by pirates. With him he brought his wife, a daughter (Marthe) six years old and half a dozen attendants. One of these attendants was skilled in the knowledge of herbs and in 1419 cured the Dauphin (afterwards Charles VII. of France) of an illness. D'Isalguier wrote an account of his travels and produced a dic tionary in Arabic, Tuareg and Songhai, with Latin and French equivalents. These books are now lost. They were in the library of the Jesuits' college at Lyons at the end of the 17th century, where they were consulted by the Abbe Tricaud, who refers to them in his Essais de litterature pour la connaissance des livres (Paris, 1 702) though the Abbe shows no interest in the light d'Isalguier's narrative must have thrown on a puzzling problem of African geography—the course of the great river Niger. Memories of d'Isalguier and his black household—he had a grand son known as "The Moor"—long lingered at Toulouse and in a still existing 15th-century ms., Historie chronologique des Parle ments de Languedoc, written by a suitor for Marthe's hand, an account of d'Isalguier's travels is inserted.
See Ch. de la Ronciere, La Decouverte de l'Afrique du Moyen Age, vol. iii. (Cairo, 1927).
