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I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

The World peopled by Migration from one Centre by Pleistocene Man--The Primary Groups evolved each in its special Habitat-- Pleistocene Man: Pithecanthropus erectus; The Mauer jaw, Homo Heidelbergensis; The Piltdown skull, Eoanthropus Dawsoni--General View of Pleistocene Man--The first Migrations--Early Man and his Works--Classification of Human Types: H. primigenius, Neandertal or Mousterian Man; H. recens, Galley Hill or Aurignacian Man-- Physical Types--Human Culture: Reutelian, Mafflian, Mesvinian, Strepyan, Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrian, Magdalenian, Azilian--Chronology--The early History of Man a Geological Problem--The Human Varieties the Outcome of their several Environments--Correspondence of Geographical with Racial and Cultural Zones.

In order to a clear understanding of the many difficult questions connected with the natural history of the human family, two cardinal points have to be steadily borne in mind--the specific unity of all existing varieties, and the dispersal of their generalised precursors over the whole world in pleistocene times. As both points have elsewhere been dealt with by me somewhat fully[1], it will here suffice to show their direct bearing on the general evolution of the human species from that remote epoch to the present day.

It must be obvious that, if man is specifically one, though not necessarily sprung of a single pair, he must have had, in homely language, a single cradle-land, from which the peopling of the earth was brought about by migration, not by independent developments from different species in so many independent geographical areas.

It follows further, and this point is all-important, that, since the world was peopled by pleistocene man, it was peopled by a generalised proto-human form, prior to all later racial differences. The existing groups, according to this hypothesis, have developed in different areas independently and divergently by continuous adaptation to their several environments. If they still constitute mere varieties, and not distinct species, the reason is because all come of like pleistocene ancestry, while the divergences have been confined to relatively narrow limits, that is, not wide enough to be regarded zoologically as specific differences.

The battle between monogenists and polygenists cannot be decided until more facts are at our disposal, and much will doubtless be said on both sides for some time to come[2]. Among the views of human origins brought forward in recent years should be mentioned the daring theory of Klaatsch[3]. Recognising two distinct human types, Neandertal and Aurignac (see pp. 8, 9 below), and two distinct anthropoid types, gorilla and orang-utan, he derives Neandertal man and African gorilla from one common ancestor, and Aurignac man and Asiatic orang-utan from another. Though anatomists, especially those conversant with anthropoid structure[4], are not able to accept this view, they admit that many difficulties may be solved by the recognition of more than one primordial stock of human ancestors[5]. The questions of adaptation to climate and environment[6], the possibilities of degeneracy, the varying degrees of physiological activity, of successful mutations, the effects of crossing and all the complicated problems of heredity are involved in the discussion, and it must be acknowledged that our information concerning all of these is entirely inadequate.

Nevertheless all speculations on the subject are not based merely on hypotheses, and three discoveries of late years have provided solid facts for the working out of the problem.

These discoveries were the remains of Pithecanthropus erectus[7] in Java, in 1892, of the Mauer jaw[8], near Heidelberg, in 1907, and of the Piltdown skull[9] in Sussex in 1912. Although the Mauer jaw was accepted without hesitation, the controversy concerning the correct interpretation of the Javan fossils has been raging for more than twenty years and shows no sign of abating, while Eoanthropus Dawsoni is too recent an intruder into the arena to be fairly dealt with at present. Certain facts however stand out clearly. In late pliocene or early pleistocene times certain early ancestral forms were already in existence which can scarcely be excluded from the Hominidae. In range they were as widely distributed as Java in the east to Heidelberg and Sussex in the west, and in spite of divergence in type a certain correlation is not impossible, even if the Piltdown specimen should finally be regarded as representing a distinct genus[10]. Each contributes facts of the utmost importance for the tracing out of the history of human evolution. Pithecanthropus raises the vexed question as to whether the erect attitude or brain development came first in the story. The conjunction of pre-human braincase with human thighbone appeared to favour the popular view that the erect attitude was the earlier, but the evidence of embryology suggests a reverse order. And although at first the thighbone was recognised as distinctly human it seems that of late doubts have been cast on this interpretation[11], and even the claim to the title erectus is called in question. The characters of straightness and slenderness on which much stress was laid are found in exaggerated form in gibbons and lemurs. The intermediate position in respect of mental endowment (in so far as brain can be estimated by cranial capacity) is shown in the accompanying diagram in which the cranial measurements of Pithecanthropus are compared with those of a chimpanzee and prehistoric man. The teeth strengthen the evidence, for they are described as too large for a man and too small for an ape. Thus Pithecanthropus has been confidently assigned to a place in a branch of the human family tree.

The Mauer jaw, the geological age of which is undisputed, also represents intermediate characters. The extraordinary strength and thickness of bone, the wide ascending ramus with shallow sigmoid notch (distinctly simian features) and the total absence of chin[12] would deny it a place among human jaws, but the teeth, which are all fortunately preserved in their sockets, are not only definitely human, but show in certain peculiarities less simian features than are to be found in the dentition of modern man[13].

The cranial capacity of the Piltdown skull, though variously estimated[14], is certainly greater than that of Pithecanthropus, the general outlines with steeply rounded forehead resemble that of modern man, and the bones are almost without exception typically human. The jaw, however, though usually attributed to the same individual[15], recalls the primitive features of the Mauer specimen in its thick ascending portion and shallow notch, while in certain characters it differs from any known jaw, ancient or modern[16]. The evidence afforded by the teeth is even more striking. The teeth of Pithecanthropus and of Homo Heidelbergensis were recognised as remarkably human, and although primitive in type, are far more advanced in the line of human evolution than the lowly features with which they are associated would lead one to expect. The Piltdown teeth are more primitive in certain characters than those of either the Javan or the Heidelberg remains. The first molar has been compared to that of Taubach, the most ape-like of human or pre-human teeth hitherto recorded, but the canine tooth (found by P. Teilhard in the same stratum in 1913[17]) finds no parallel in any known human jaw; it resembles the milk canine of the chimpanzee more than that of the adult dentition.

It cannot be said that any clear view of pleistocene man can be obtained from these imperfect scraps of evidence, valuable though they are. Rather may we agree with Keith that the problem grows more instead of less complex. "In our first youthful burst of Darwinianism we pictured our evolution as a simple procession of forms leading from ape to man. Each age, as it passed, transformed the men of the time one stage nearer to us--one more distant from the ape. The true picture is very different. We have to conceive an ancient world in which the family of mankind was broken up into narrow groups or genera, each genus again divided into a number of species--much as we see in the monkey or ape world of to-day. Then out of that great welter of forms one species became the dominant form, and ultimately the sole surviving one--the species represented by the modern races of mankind[18]."

We may assume therefore that the earth was mainly peopled by the generalised pleistocene precursors, who moved about, like the other migrating faunas, unconsciously, everywhere following the lines of least resistance, advancing or receding, and acting generally on blind impulse rather than of any set purpose.

That such must have been the nature of the first migratory movements will appear evident when we consider that they were carried on by rude hordes, all very much alike, and differing not greatly from other zoological groups, and further that these migrations took place prior to the development of all cultural appliances beyond the ability to wield a broken branch or a sapling, or else chip or flake primitive stone implements[19].

Herein lies the explanation of the curious phenomenon, which was a stumbling-block to premature systematists, that all the works of early man everywhere present the most startling resemblances, affording absolutely no elements for classification, for instance, during the times corresponding with the Chellean or first period of the Old Stone Age. The implements of palaeolithic type so common in parts of South India, South Africa, the Sudan, Egypt, etc., present a remarkable resemblance to one another. This, while affording a prima facies case for, is not conclusive of, the migrations of a definite type of humanity.

After referring to the identity of certain objects from the Hastings kitchen-middens and a barrow near Sevenoaks, W. J. L. Abbot proceeds: "The first thing that would strike one in looking over a few trays of these implements is the remarkable likeness which they bear to those of Dordogne. Indeed many of the figures in the magnificent 'Reliquiae Aquitanicae' might almost have been produced from these specimens[20]." And Sir J. Evans, extending his glance over a wider horizon, discovers implements in other distant lands "so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands.... On the banks of the Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements of the European types have been discovered, while in Somaliland, in an ancient river valley, at a great elevation above the sea, Seton-Karr has collected a large number of implements formed of flint and quartzite, which, judging from their form and character, might have been dug out of the drift-deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or the ancient Solent[21]."

It was formerly held that man himself showed a similar uniformity, and all palaeolithic skulls were referred to one long-headed type, called, from the most famous example, the Neandertal, which was regarded as having close affinities with the present Australians. But this resemblance is shown by Boule[22] and others to be purely superficial, and recent archaeological finds indicate that more than one racial type was in existence in the Palaeolithic Age.

W. L. H. Duckworth on anatomical evidence constructs the following table[23].

Group I. Early ancestral forms. Ex. gr. H. heidelbergensis.

Group II. Subdivision A. H. primigenius. Ex. gr. La Chapelle. Subdivision B. H. recens; with varieties { H. fossilis. Ex. gr. Galley Hill. { H. sapiens.

H. Obermaier[24] argues as follows: Homo primigenius is neither the representative of an intermediate species between ape and man, nor a lower or distinct type than Homo sapiens, but an older primitive variety (race) of the latter, which survives in exceptional cases down to the present day[25]. Clearly then, according to the rules of zoological classification, we must term the two, Homo sapiens var. primigenius, as compared with Homo sapiens var. recens.

Whatever classification or nomenclature may be adopted the dual division in palaeolithic times is now generally recognised. The more primitive type is commonly called Neandertal man, from the famous cranium found in the Neandertal cave in 1857, or Mousterian man, from the culture associations. To this group belong the Gibraltar skull[26], and the skeletons from Spy[27], and Krapina, Croatia[28], together with the later discoveries (1908-11) at La Chapelle[29] (Correze), Le Moustier[30], La Ferassie[31] (Dordogne) and many others.

Palaeolithic examples of the modern human type have been found at Bruex (Bohemia)[32], Bruenn (Moravia)[33] and Galley Hill in Kent[34], but the most complete find was that at Combe Capelle in 1909[35]. The numerous skeletons found at Cro-Magnon[36] and at the Grottes de Grimaldi at Mentone[37] though showing certain skeletal differences may be included in this group, the earliest examples of which are associated with Aurignacian culture[38].

From the evidence contributed by these examples the main characteristics of the two groups may be indicated, although, owing to the imperfection of the records, any generalisations must necessarily be tentative and subject to criticism.

The La Chapelle skull recalls many of the primitive features of the "ancestral types." The low receding forehead, the overhanging brow-ridges, forming continuous horizontal bars of bone overshadowing the orbits, the inflated circumnasal region, the enormous jaws, with massive ascending ramus, shallow sigmoid notch, "negative" chin and other "simian" characters seem reminiscent of Pithecanthropus and Homo Heidelbergensis. The cranial capacity however is estimated at over 1600 c.c., thus exceeding that of the average modern European, and this development, even though associated, as M. Boule has pointed out, with a comparatively lowly brain, is of striking significance. The low stature, probably about 1600 mm. (under 5-1/2 feet) makes the size of the skull and cranial capacity all the more remarkable. "A survey of the characters of Neanderthal man--as manifested by his skeleton, brain cast, and teeth--have convinced anthropologists of two things: first, that we are dealing with a form of man totally different from any form now living; and secondly, that the kind of difference far exceeds that which separates the most divergent of modern human races[39]."

The earliest complete and authentic example of "Aurignacian man" was the skeleton discovered near Combe Capelle (Dordogne) in 1909[40]. The stature is low, not exceeding that of the Neandertal type, but the limb bones are slighter and the build is altogether lighter and more slender. The greatest contrast lies in the skull. The forehead is vertical instead of receding, and the strongly projecting brow-ridges are diminished, the jaw is less massive and less simian with regard to all the features mentioned above. Especially is this difference noticeable in the projection of the chin, which now for the first time shows the modern human outline. In short there are no salient features which cannot be matched among the living races of the present day.

On the cultural side no less than on the physical, the thousands of years which the lowest estimate attributes to the Early Stone Age were marked by slow but continuous changes.

The Reutelian (at the junction of the Pliocene and Pleistocene), Mafflian and Mesvinian industries, recognised by M. Rutot in Belgium, belong to the doubtful Eolithic Period, not yet generally accepted[41].

The lowest palaeolithic deposit is the Strepyan, so called from Strepy, near Charleroi, typically represented at St Acheul, Amiens, and recognised also in the Thames Valley[42]. The tools exhibit deliberate flaking, and mark the transition between eolithic and palaeolithic work. The associated fauna includes two species of elephant, E. meridionalis and E. antiquus, two species of rhinoceros, R. Etruscus and R. Merckii, and the hippopotamus. It is possible that the Mauer jaw and the Piltdown skull belong to this stage.

The Chellean industry[43], with the typical coarsely flaked almond-shaped implements, occurs abundantly in the South of England and in France, less commonly in Belgium, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, while examples have been recognised in Palestine, Egypt, Somaliland, Cape Colony, Madras and other localities, though outside Europe the date is not always ascertainable and the form is not an absolute criterion[44].

Acheulean types succeed apparently in direct descent but the implements are altogether lighter, sharper, more efficient, and are characterised by finer workmanship and carefully retouched edges. A small finely finished lanceolate implement is typical of the sub-industry or local development at La Micoque (Dordogne).

The Chellean industry is associated with a warm climate and the remains of Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros Merckii and hippopotamus. Lower Acheulean shows little variation, but with Upper Acheulean certain animals indicating a colder climate make their appearance, including the mammoth, Elephas primigenius, and the woolly rhinoceros, R. tichorhinus, but no reindeer.

The Mousterian industry is entirely distinct from its predecessors. The warm fauna has disappeared, the reindeer first occurs together with the musk ox, arctic fox, the marmot and other cold-loving animals. Man appears to have sought refuge in the caves, and from complete skeletons found in cave deposits of this stage we gain the first clear ideas concerning the physical type of man of the early palaeolithic period. Typical Mousterian implements consist of leaf-like or triangular points made from flakes struck from the nodule instead of from the dressed nodule itself, as in the earlier stages. The Levallois flakes, occurring at the base of the Mousterian (sometimes included in the Acheulean stage), initiate this new style of workmanship, but the Mousterian point shows an improvement in shape and a greater mastery in technique, producing a more efficient tool for piercing and cutting. Scrapers, carefully retouched, with a curved edge are also characteristic, besides many other forms. The complete skeletons from Le Moustier itself, La Chapelle, La Ferassie, and Krapina all belong to this stage, which marks the end of the lower palaeolithic period, the Age of the Mammoth.

The upper palaeolithic or Reindeer Age is divided into Aurignacian, Solutrian, and Magdalenian[45] culture stages, with the Azilian[46] separating the Magdalenian from the neolithic period. Each stage is distinguished by its implements and its art. The Aurignacian fauna, though closely resembling the Mousterian, indicates an amelioration of climate, the most abundant animals being the bison, horse, cave lion, and cave hyena, and human settlements are again found in the open. Among the typical implements are finely worked knife-like blades (Chatelperron point, Gravette point), keeled scrapers (Tarte type), burins or gravers, and various tools and ornaments of bone. Art is represented by engravings and wall paintings, and to this stage belong statuettes representing nude female figures such as those of Brassempouy, Mentone, Pont-a-Lesse (Belgium), Predmost and Willendorf, near Krems. The Neandertal type appears to have died out and Aurignacian man belongs to the modern type represented at Combe Capelle. If the evidence of the figurines is to be accepted, a steatopygous race was at this time in existence, which Sollas is inclined to connect with the Bushmen[47].

The Solutrian stage is characterised by the abundance of the horse, replaced in the succeeding period by the reindeer. The Solutrians seem to have been a warlike steppe people who came from the east into western Europe. Their subsequent fate has not been elucidated. The culture appears to have had a limited range, only a few stations being found outside Dordogne and the neighbouring departments. The technique, as shown in the laurel-leaf and willow-leaf points, exhibits a perfection of workmanship unequalled in the Palaeolithic Age, and only excelled by late prehistoric knives of Egypt.

The rock shelter at La Madeleine has given its name to the closing epoch of the Palaeolithic Age. The flint industry shows distinct decadence, but the working in bone and horn was at its zenith; indeed, so marked is the contrast between this and the preceding stage that Breuil is convinced that "the first Magdalenians were not evolved from the Solutrians; they were new-comers in our region[48]." The typical implements are barbed harpoons in reindeer antler (later that of the stag), often decorated with engravings. Sculpture and engravings of animals in life-like attitudes are among the most remarkable records of the age, and the polychrome pictures in the caves of Altamira, "the Sistine chapel of Quaternary Art," are the admiration of the world[49].

In the cave of Mas-d'Azil, between the Magdalenian and Neolithic deposits occurs a stratum, termed Azilian, which, to some extent, bridges over the obscure transition between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Ages. The reindeer has disappeared, and its place is taken by the stag. The realistic art of the Magdalenians is succeeded by a more geometric style. In flint working a return is made to Aurignacian methods, and a particular development of pygmy flints has received the name Tardenoisian[50].

The characteristic implement is still the harpoon, but it differs in shape from the Magdalenian implement, owing to the different structure of the material. Painted pebbles, marked with red and black lines, in some cases suggesting a script, have given rise to much controversy. Their meaning at present remains obscure[51].

The question of prehistoric chronology is a difficult one, and the more cautious authorities do not commit themselves to dates. Of late years, however, such researches as those of A. Penck and E. Brueckner in the Alps[52] and of Baron de Geer and W. C. Brogger in Sweden[53], have provided a sound basis for calculations. Penck recognises four periods of glaciation during the pleistocene period, which he has named after typical areas, the Guenz, Mindel, Riss and Wuerm. He dates the Wuerm maximum at between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago and estimates the duration of the Riss-Wuerm interglacial period at about 100,000 years. According to his calculations the Chellean industry occurs in the Mindel-Riss, or even in the Guenz-Mindel interval, but it is more commonly placed in the mild phase intervening before the last (Wuerm) glaciation, this latter corresponding with the cold Mousterian stage. At least four subsequent oscillations of climate have been recognised by Penck, the Achen, Buehl, Gschnitz and Daun, and the correspondence of these with palaeolithic culture stages may be seen in the following table[54].

Penck and Brueckner Obermaier and others Rutot

Post-glacial {Daun } Azilian Proto-Neolithic} with {Gschnitz} Azilian } oscillations {Buehl } Magdalenian } Neolithic {Achen } Magdalenian Solutrian and } } Aurignacian } IV. Wuerm. 4th Glacial } Mousterian Lower Lower Mousterian Magdalenian and Acheulean Riss-Wuerm. 3rd Solutrian and Chellean Upper Interglacial Aurignacian Mousterian Warm Mousterian III. Riss. 3rd Glacial Cold Mousterian Lower Acheulean Chellean Mindel-Riss. 2nd Acheulean Mauer jaw Strepyan Interglacial Chellean Pre-Palaeolithic Mesvinian Mafflian II. Mindel. 2nd Glacial } } } } Guenz-Mindel. 1st } No artefacts } No artefacts Interglacial } } } } I. Guenz. 1st Glacial } }

James Geikie[55], under the heading, "Reliable and Unreliable estimates of geological time," points out that the absolute duration of the Pleistocene cannot be determined, but such investigations as those of Penck "enable us to form some conception of the time involved." He accepts as a rough approximation Penck's opinion that "the Glacial period with all its climatic changes may have extended over half a million years, and as the Chellean stage dates back to at least the middle of the period, this would give somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 years for the antiquity of man in Europe. But if, as recent discoveries would seem to indicate, man was an occupant of our Continent during the First Interglacial epoch, if not in still earlier times, we may be compelled greatly to increase our estimate of his antiquity" (p. 303).

W. J. Sollas, on the other hand, is content with a far more contracted measure. Basing his calculations mainly on the investigations of de Geer, he concludes that the interval that separates our time from the beginning of the end of the last glacial episode is 17,000 years. He places the Azilian age at 5500 B.C., the middle of the Magdalenian age somewhere about 8000 B.C., Mousterian 15,000 B.C., and the close of the Chellean 25,000 B.C.[56]

But when all the changes in climate are taken into consideration, the periods of elevation and depression of the land, the transformations of the animals, the evolution of man, the gradual stages of advance in human culture, the development of the races of mankind, and their distribution over the surface of the globe, this estimate is regarded by many as insufficient. Allen Sturge claims "scores of thousands of years" for the neolithic period alone[57], and Sir W. Turner points out the very remote times to which the appearance of neolithic man must be assigned in Scotland. After showing that there is undoubted evidence of the presence of man in North Britain during the formation of the Carse clays, this careful observer explains that the Carse cliffs, now in places 45 to 50 feet above the present sea-level, formed the bed of an estuary or arm of the sea, which in post-glacial times extended almost, if not quite across the land from east to west, thus separating the region south of the Forth from North Britain. He even suggests, after the separation of Britain from the Continent in earlier times, another land connection, a "Neolithic land-bridge" by which the men of the New Stone Age may have reached Scotland when the upheaved 100-foot terrace was still clothed with the great forest growths that have since disappeared[58].

One begins to ask, Are even 100,000 years sufficient for such oscillations of the surface, upheaval of marine beds, appearance of great estuaries, renewed connection of Britain with the Continent by a "Neolithic land-bridge"? In the Falkirk district neolithic kitchen-middens occur on, or at the base of, the bluffs which overlook the Carse lands, that is, the old sea-coast. In the Carse of Gowrie also a dug-out canoe was found at the very base of the deposits, and immediately above the buried forest-bed of the Tay Valley[59].

That the neolithic period was also of long duration even in Scandinavia has been made evident by Carl Wibling, who calculates that the geological changes on the south-east coast of Sweden (Province of Bleking), since its first occupation by the men of the New Stone Age, must have required a period of "at least 10,000 years[60]."

Still more startling are the results of the protracted researches carried on by J. Nueesch at the now famous station of Schweizersbild, near Schaffhausen in Switzerland[61]. This station was apparently in the continuous occupation of man during both Stone Ages, and here have been collected as many as 14,000 objects belonging to the first, and over 6000 referred to the second period. Although the early settlement was only post-glacial, a point about which there is no room for doubt, L. Laloy[62] has estimated "the absolute duration of both epochs together at from 24,000 to 29,000 years." We may, therefore, ask, If a comparatively recent post-glacial station in Switzerland is about 29,000 years old, how old may a pre- or inter-glacial station be in Gaul or Britain?

From all this we see how fully justified is J. W. Powell's remark that the natural history of early man becomes more and more a geological, and not merely an ethnological problem[63]. We also begin to understand how it is that, after an existence of some five score millenniums, the first specialised human varieties have diverged greatly from the original types, which have thus become almost "ideal quantities," the subjects rather of palaeontological than of strictly anthropological studies.

And here another consideration of great moment presents itself. During these long ages some of the groups--most African negroes south of the equator, most Oceanic negroes (Negritoes and Papuans), and Australian and American aborigines--have remained in their original habitats ever since what may be called the first settlement of the earth by man. Others again, the more restless or enterprising peoples, such as the Mongols, Manchus, Turks, Ugro-Finns, Arabs, and most Europeans, have no doubt moved about somewhat freely; but these later migrations, whether hostile or peaceable, have for the most part been confined to regions presenting the same or like physical and climatic conditions. Wherever different climatic zones have been invaded, the intruders have failed to secure a permanent footing, either perishing outright, or disappearing by absorption or more or less complete assimilation to the aboriginal elements. Such are some "black Arabs" in Egyptian Sudan, other Semites and Hamites in Abyssinia and West Sudan (Himyarites, Fulahs and others), Finns and Turks in Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula (Magyars, Bulgars, Osmanli), Portuguese and Netherlanders in Malaysia, English in tropical or sub-tropical lands, such as India, where Eurasian half-breeds alone are capable of founding family groups.

The human varieties are thus seen to be, like all other zoological species, the outcome of their several environments. They are what climate, soil, diet, pursuits and inherited characters have made them, so that all sudden transitions are usually followed by disastrous results[64]. "To urge the emigration of women and children, or of any save those of the most robust health, to the tropics, may not be to murder in the first degree, but it should be classed, to put it mildly, as incitement to it[65]." Acclimatisation may not be impossible but in all extreme cases it can be effected only at great sacrifice of life, and by slow processes, the most effective of which is perhaps Natural Selection. By this means we may indeed suppose the world to have been first peopled.

At the same time it should be remembered that we know little of the climatic conditions at the time of the first migrations, though it has been assumed that it was everywhere much milder than at present. Consequently the different zones of temperature were less marked, and the passage from one region to another more easily effected than in later times. In a word the pleistocene precursors had far less difficulty in adapting themselves to their new surroundings than modern peoples have when they emigrate, for instance, from Southern Europe to Brazil and Paraguay, or from the British Isles to Rhodesia and Nyassaland.

What is true of man must be no less true of his works; from which it follows that racial and cultural zones correspond in the main with zones of temperature, except so far as the latter may be modified by altitude, marine influences, or other local conditions. A glance at past and existing relations the world over will show that such harmonies have at all times prevailed. No doubt the overflow of the leading European peoples during the last 400 years has brought about divers dislocations, blurrings, and in places even total effacements of the old landmarks.

But, putting aside these disturbances, it will be found that in the Eastern hemisphere the inter-tropical regions, hot, moist and more favourable to vegetable than to animal vitality, are usually occupied by savage, cultureless populations. Within the same sphere are also comprised most of the extra-tropical southern lands, all tapering towards the antarctic waters, isolated, and otherwise unsuitable for areas of higher specialisation.

Similarly the sub-tropical Asiatic peninsulas, the bleak Tibetan tableland, the Pamir, and arid Mongolian steppes are found mainly in possession of somewhat stationary communities, which present every stage between sheer savagery and civilisation.

In the same way the higher races and cultures are confined to the more favoured north temperate zone, so that between the parallels of 24 deg. and 50 deg. (but owing to local conditions falling in the far East to 40 deg. and under, and in the extreme West rising to 55 deg.) are situated nearly all the great centres, past and present, of human activities--the Egyptian, Babylonian, Minoan (Aegean), Hellenic, Etruscan, Roman, and modern European. Almost the only exceptions are the early civilisations (Himyaritic) of Yemen (Arabia Felix) and Abyssinia, where the low latitude is neutralised by altitude and a copious rainfall.

Thanks also to altitude, to marine influences, and the contraction of the equatorial lands, the relations are almost completely reversed in the New World. Here all the higher developments took place, not in the temperate but in the tropical zone, within which lay the seats of the Peruvian, Chimu, Chibcha and Maya-Quiche cultures; the Aztec sphere alone ranged northwards a little beyond the Tropic of Cancer.

Thus in both hemispheres the iso-cultural bands follow the isothermal lines in all their deflections, and the human varieties everywhere faithfully reflect the conditions of their several environments.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ethnology, Chaps. V. and VII.

[2] See A. H. Keane, Ethnology, 1909, Chap. VII.

[3] H. Klaatsch, "Die Aurignac-Rasse und ihre Stellung im Stammbaum des Menschen," Ztschr. f. Eth. LII. 1910. See also Praehistorische Zeitschrift, Vol. I. 1909.

[4] Cf. A. Keith's criticisms in Nature, Vol. LXXXV. 1911, p. 508.

[5] W. L. H. Duckworth, Prehistoric Man, 1912, p. 146.

[6] W. Ridgeway, "The Influence of Environment on Man," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst., Vol. XL. 1910, p. 10.

[7] E. Dubois, "Pithecanthropus erectus, transitional form between Man and the Apes," Sci. Trans. R. Dublin Soc. 1898.

[8] O. Schoetensack, Der Unterkiefer des Homo Heidelbergensis, etc., 1908.

[9] C. Dawson and A. Smith Woodward, "On the Discovery of a Palaeolithic Skull and Mandible," etc., Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. 1913.

[10] This was the view of A. Smith Woodward when the skull was first exhibited (loc. cit.), but in his paper, "Missing Links among Extinct Animals," Brit. Ass. Birmingham, 1913, he is inclined to regard "Piltdown man, or some close relative" as "on the direct line of descent with ourselves." For A. Keith's criticism see The Antiquity of Man, 1915, p. 503.

[11] W. L. H. Duckworth, Prehistoric Man, 1912, p. 8.

[12] For the relation between chin formation and power of speech, see E. Walkhoff, "Der Unterkiefer der Anthropomorphen und des Menschen in seiner funktionellen Entwicklung und Gestalt," E. Selenka, Menschenaffen, 1902; H. Obermaier, Der Mensch der Vorzeit, 1912, p. 362; and W. Wright, "The Mandible of Man from the Morphological and Anthropological points of view," Essays and Studies presented to W. Ridgeway, 1913.

[13] Cf. W. L. H. Duckworth, Prehistoric Man, 1912, p. 10, and A. Keith, The Antiquity of Man, 1915, p. 237.

[14] A. Smith Woodward, 1070 c.c.; A. Keith, 1400 c.c.

[15] G. G. MacCurdy, following G. S. Miller, Smithsonian Misc. Colls. Vol. 65, No. 12 (1915), is convinced that "in place of Eoanthropus dawsoni we have two individuals belonging to different genera," a human cranium and the jaw of a chimpanzee. Science, N.S. Vol. XLIII. 1916, p. 231. See also Appendix A.

[16] For a full description see Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. March, 1913. Also A. Keith, The Antiquity of Man, 1915, p. 320, and pp. 430-452.

[17] C. Dawson and A. Smith Woodward, "Supplementary Note on the Discovery of a Palaeolithic Human Skull and Mandible at Piltdown (Sussex)," Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. April, 1914.

[18] The Antiquity of Man, 1915, p. 209.

[19] Thus Lucretius:

"Arma antiqua manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides, et item silvarum fragmina rami."

[20] Jour. Anthrop. Inst. 1896, p. 133.

[21] Inaugural Address, Brit. Ass. Meeting, Toronto, 1897.

[22] M. Boule, "L'homme fossile de la Chapelle-aux-Saints," Annales de Paleontologie, 1911 (1913). Cf. also H. Obermaier, Der Mensch der Vorzeit, 1912, p. 364.

[23] Prehistoric Man, 1912, p. 60.

[24] Der Mensch der Vorzeit, 1912, p. 365.

[25] This is not generally accepted. See A. Keith's diagram, p. 5 and pp. 9-10.

[26] W. J. Sollas, "On the Cranial and Facial Characters of the Neandertal Race," Phil. Trans. 1907, CXCIV.

[27] J. Fraipont and M. Lohest, "Recherches Ethnographiques sur les Ossements Humains," etc., Arch. de Biologie, 1887.

[28] Gorjanovi[vc]-Kramberger, Der diluviale Mensch von Krapina in Kroatia, 1906.

[29] M. Boule, "L'homme fossile de la Chapelle-aux-Saints," L'Anthr. XIX. 1908, and Annales de Paleontologie, 1911 (1913).

[30] H. Klaatsch, Praehistorische Zeitschrift, Vol. I. 1909.

[31] Peyrony and Capitan, Rev. de l'Ecole d'Anthrop. 1909; Bull. Soc. d'Anthr. de Paris, 1910.

[32] G. Schwalbe, "Der Schaedel von Bruex," Zeitschr. f. Morph. u. Anthr. 1906.

[33] Makowsky, "Der diluviale Mensch in Loess von Bruenn," Mitt. Anthrop. Gesell. in Wien, 1892.

[34] See A. Keith, The Antiquity of Man, 1915, Chap. X.

[35] H. Klaatsch, "Die Aurignac-Rasse," etc., Zeitschr. f. Ethn. LII. 1910.

[36] L. Lartet, "Une sepulture des troglodytes du Perigord," and Broca, "Sur les cranes et ossements des Eyzies," Bull. Soc. d'Anthr. de Paris, 1868.

[37] R. Verneau, Les Grottes de Grimaldi, 1906-11.

[38] For a complete list with bibliographical references, see H. Obermaier, "Les restes humains Quaternaires dans l'Europe centrale," Anthr. 1905, p. 385, 1906, p. 55.

[39] A. Keith, The Antiquity of Man, 1915, p. 158. See also W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters, 1915, p. 186 ff.

[40] H. Klaatsch, "Die Aurignac-Rasse," Zeitschr. f. Eth. 1910, LII. p. 513.

[41] The Mesvinian implements are now accepted as artefacts and placed by H. Obermaier immediately below the Chellean, though M. Commont interprets them as Acheulean or even later. See W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters, 1915, p. 132 ff.

[42] R. Smith and H. Dewey, "Stratification at Swanscombe," Archaeologia, LXIV. 1912.

[43] So called from Chelles-sur-Marne, near Paris.

[44] Cf. J. Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, I. 1908, p. 89.

[45] From Aurignac (Haute-Garonne), Solutre (Saone-et-Loire), and La Madeleine (Dordogne).

[46] Mas-d'Azil, Ariege.

[47] W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters, 1915, pp. 378-9.

[48] "Les Subdivisions de paleolithique superieur," Congres Internat. d'Anth. 1912, XIV. pp. 190-3.

[49] H. Breuil and E. Cartailhac, La Caverne d'Altamira, 1906. For a list of decorated caves, with the names of their discoverers, see J. Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, I. 1908, p. 241. A complete Repertoire de l'Art Quaternaire is given by S. Reinach, 1913; and for chronology see E. Piette, "Classifications des Sediments formes dans les cavernes pendant l'Age du Renne," Anthr. 1904.

[50] From La Fere-en-Tardenois, Aisne.

[51] Cf. W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters, 1915, pp. 95, 534 f.

[52] Die Alpen in Eiszeitalter, 1901-9. See also "Alter des Menschengeschlechts," Zeit. f. Eth. XL. 1908.

[53] See W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters, 1915, p. 561.

[54] H. Obermaier, Der Mensch der Vorzeit, 1911-2, p. 332.

[55] The Antiquity of Man in Europe, 1914, p. 301.

[56] Ancient Hunters, 1915, p. 567.

[57] Proc. Prehist. Soc. E. Anglia, 1. 1911, p. 60.

[58] Discourse at the R. Institute, London, Nature, Jan. 6 and 13, 1898.

[59] Nature, 1898, p. 235.

[60] Tiden foer Blekings foersta bebyggande, Karlskrona, 1895, p. 5.

[61] "Das Schweizersbild, eine Niederlassung aus palaeolithischer und neolithischer Zeit," in Nouveaux Memoires Soc. Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles, Vol. XXXV. Zurich, 1896. This is described by James Geikie, The Antiquity of Man in Europe, 1914, pp. 85-99.

[62] L'Anthropologie, 1897, p. 350.

[63] Forum, Feb. 1898.

[64] The party of Eskimo men and women brought back by Lieut. Peary from his Arctic expedition in 1897 were unable to endure our temperate climate. Many died of pneumonia, and the survivors were so enfeebled that all had to be restored to their icy homes to save their lives. Even for the Algonquians of Labrador a journey to the coast is a journey to the grave.

[65] W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, 1900, p. 586.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. THE METAL AGES--HISTORIC TIMES AND PEOPLES

Progress of Archaeological Studies--Sequence of the Metal Ages--The Copper Age--Egypt, Elam, Babylonia, Europe--The Bronze Age--Egypt and Babylonia, Western Europe, the Aegean, Ireland--Chronology of the Copper and Bronze Ages--The Iron Age--Hallstatt, La Tene--Man and his Works in the Metal Ages--The Prehistoric Age in the West, and in China--Historic Times--Evolution of Writing Systems-- Hieroglyphs and Cuneiforms--The Alphabet--The Persian and other Cuneiform Scripts--The Mas-d'Azil Markings--Alphabetiform Signs on Neolithic Monuments--Character and Consequences of the later historic Migrations--The Race merges in the People--The distinguishing Characters of Peoples--Scheme of Classification.

If, as above seen, the study of human origins is largely a geological problem, the investigation of the later developments, during the Metal Ages and prehistoric times, belongs mainly to the field of Archaeology. Hence it is that for the light which has in recent years been thrown upon the obscure interval between the Stone Ages and the strictly historic epoch, that is to say, the period when in his continuous upward development man gradually exchanged stone for the more serviceable metals, we are indebted chiefly to the pioneer labours of such men as Worsaae, Steenstrup, Forchhammer, Schliemann, Sayce, Layard, Lepsius, Mariette, Maspero, Montelius, Brugsch, Petrie, Peters, Haynes, Sir J. Evans, Sir A. J. Evans and many others, all archaeologists first, and anthropologists only in the second instance.

From the researches of these investigators it is now clear that copper, bronze, and iron were successively in use in Europe in the order named, so that the current expressions, "Copper," "Bronze," and "Iron" Ages remain still justified. But it also appears that overlappings, already beginning in late Neolithic times, were everywhere so frequent that in many localities it is quite impossible to draw any well-marked dividing lines between the successive metal periods.

That iron came last, a fact already known by vague tradition to the ancients[66], is beyond doubt, and it is no less certain that bronze of various types intervened between copper and iron. But much obscurity still surrounds the question of copper, which occurs in so many graves of Neolithic and Bronze times, that this metal has even been denied an independent position in the sequence.

But we shall not be surprised that confusion should prevail on this point, if we reflect that the metals, unlike stone, came to remain. Once introduced they were soon found to be indispensable to civilised man, so that in a sense the "Metal Ages" still survive, and must last to the end of time. Hence it was natural that copper should be found in prehistoric graves associated, first with polished stone implements, and then with bronze and iron, just as, since the arrival of the English in Australia, spoons, clay pipes, penknives, pannikins, and the like, are now found mingled with stone objects in the graves of the aborigines.

But that there was a true Copper Age[67] prior to that of Bronze, though possibly of not very long duration, except of course in the New World[68], has been placed beyond reasonable doubt by recent investigations. Considerable attention was devoted to the subject by J. H. Gladstone, who finds that copper was worked by the Egyptians in the Sinaitic Peninsula, that is, in the famous mines of the Wadi Maghara, from the fourth to the eighteenth dynasty, perhaps from 3000 to 1580 B.C.[69] During that epoch tools were made of pure copper in Egypt and Syria, and by the Amorites in Palestine, often on the model of their stone prototypes[70].

Elliot Smith[71] claims that "the full story of the coming of copper, complete in every detail and circumstance, written in a simple and convincing fashion that he who runs may read," has been displayed in Egypt ever since the year 1894, though the full significance of the evidence was not recognised until Reisner called attention to the record of pre-dynastic graves in Upper Egypt when superintending the excavations at Naga-ed-der in 1908[72]. These excavations revealed the indigenous civilisation of the ancient Egyptians and, according to Elliot Smith, dispose of the idea hitherto held by most archaeologists that Egypt owed her knowledge of metals to Babylonia or some other Asiatic source, where copper, and possibly also bronze, may be traced back to the fourth millennium B.C. There was doubtless intercourse between the civilisations of Egypt and Babylonia but "Reisner has revealed the complete absence of any evidence to show or even to suggest that the language, the mode of writing, the knowledge of copper ... were imported" (p. 34). Elliot Smith justly claims (p. 6) that in no other country has a similarly complete history of the discovery and the evolution of the working of copper been revealed, but until equally exhaustive excavations have been undertaken on contemporary or earlier sites in Sumer and Elam, the question cannot be regarded as settled.

The work of J. de Morgan at Susa[73] (1907-8) shows the extreme antiquity of the Copper Age in ancient Elam, even if his estimate of 5000 B.C. is regarded as a millennium too early[74]. At the base of the mound on the natural soil, beneath 24 meters of archaeological layers, were the remains of a town and a necropolis consisting of about 1000 tombs. Those of the men contained copper axes of primitive type; those of the women, little vases of paint, together with discs of polished copper to serve as mirrors. At Fara, excavations by Koldewey in 1902, and by Andrae and Noeldeke in 1903 on the site of Shuruppak (the home of the Babylonian Noah) in the valley of the Lower Euphrates, revealed graves attributed to the prehistoric Sumerians, containing copper spear heads, axes and drinking vessels[75].

In Europe, North Italy, Hungary and Ireland[76] may lay claim to a Copper Age, but there is very little evidence of such a stage in Britain. To this period also may be attributed the nest or cache of pure copper ingots found at Tourc'h, west of the Aven Valley, Finisterre, described by M. de Villiers du Terrage, and comprising 23 pieces, with a total weight of nearly 50 lbs.[77] These objects, which belong to "the transitional period when copper was used at first concurrently with polished stone, and then disappeared as bronze came into more general use[78]," came probably from Hungary, at that time apparently the chief source of this metal for most parts of Europe. Of over 200 copper objects described by Mathaeus Much[79] nearly all were of Hungarian or South German provenance, five only being accredited to Britain and eight to France.

The study of this subject has been greatly advanced by J. Hampel, who holds on solid grounds that in some regions, especially Hungary, copper played a dominant part for many centuries, and is undoubtedly the characteristic metal of a distinct culture. His conclusions are based on the study of about 500 copper objects found in Hungary and preserved in the Buda Pesth collections. Reviewing all the facts attesting a Copper Age in Central Europe, Egypt, Italy, Cyprus, Troy, Scandinavia, North Asia, and other lands, he concludes that a Copper Age may have sprung up independently wherever the ore was found, as in the Ural and Altai Mountains, Italy, Spain, Britain, Cyprus, Sinai; such culture being generally indigenous, and giving evidence of more or less characteristic local features[80]. In fact we know for certain that such an independent Copper Age was developed not only in the region of the Great Lakes of North America, but also amongst the Bantu peoples of Katanga and other parts of Central Africa. Copper is not an alloy like bronze, but a soft, easily-worked metal occurring in large quantities and in a tolerably pure state near the surface in many parts of the world. The wonder is, not that it should have been found and worked at a somewhat remote epoch in several different centres, but that its use should have been so soon superseded in so many places by the bronze alloys.

From copper to bronze, however, the passage was slow and progressive, the proper proportion of tin, which was probably preceded in some places by an alloy of antimony, having been apparently arrived at by repeated experiments often carried out with no little skill by those prehistoric metallurgists.

As suggested by Bibra in 1869, the ores of different metals would appear to have been at first smelted together empirically, and the process continued until satisfactory results were obtained. Hence the extraordinary number of metals, of which percentages are found in some of the earlier specimens, such as those of the Elbing Museum, which on analysis yielded tin, lead, silver, iron, antimony, arsenic, sulphur, nickel, cobalt, and zinc in varying quantities[81].

Some bronzes from the pyramid of Medum analysed by J. H. Gladstone[82] yielded the high percentage of 9.1 of tin, from which we must infer, not only that bronze, but bronze of the finest quality, was already known to the Egyptians of the fourth dynasty, i.e. 2840 B.C. The statuette of Gudea of Lagash (2500 B.C.) claimed as the earliest example of bronze in Babylonia is now known to be pure copper, and though objects from Tello (Lagash) of earlier date contain a mixture of tin, zinc, arsenic and other alloys, the proportion is insignificant. The question of priority must, however, be left open until the relative chronology of Egypt and Babylonia is finally settled, and this is still a much disputed point[83]. Neither would all the difficulties with regard to the origin of bronze be cleared up should Egypt or Babylonia establish her claim to possess the earliest example of the metal, for neither country appears to possess any tin. The nearest deposit known in ancient times would seem to be that of Drangiana, mentioned by Strabo, identified with modern Khorassan[84].

Strabo and other classical writers also mention the occurrence of tin in the west, in Spain, Portugal and the Cassiterides or tin islands, whose identity has given rise to so much speculation[85], but "though in after times Egypt drew her tin from Europe it would be bold indeed to suppose that she did so [in 3000 B.C.] and still bolder to maintain that she learned from northern people how to make the alloy called bronze[86]." Apart from the indigenous Egyptian origin maintained by Elliot Smith (above) the hypothesis offering fewest difficulties is that the earliest bronze is to be traced to the region of Elam, and that the knowledge spread from S. Chaldaea (Elam-Sumer) to S. Egypt in the third millennium B.C.[87]

There seems to be little doubt that the Aegean was the centre of dispersal for the new metals throughout the Mediterranean area, and copper ingots have been found at various points of the Mediterranean, marked with Cretan signs[88]. Bronze was known in Crete before 2000 B.C. for a bronze dagger and spear head were found at Hagios Onuphrios, near Phaistos, with seals resembling those of the sixth to eleventh dynasties[89].

From the eastern Mediterranean the knowledge spread during the second millennium along the ordinary trade routes which had long been in use. The mineral ores of Spain were exploited in pre-Mycenean times and probably contributed in no small measure to the industrial development of southern Europe. From tribe to tribe, along the Atlantic coasts the traffic in minerals reached the British Isles, where the rich ores were discovered which, in their turn, supplied the markets of the north, the west and the south.

Even Ireland was not left untouched by Aegean influence, which reached it, according to G. Coffey[90], by way of the Danube and the Elbe, and thence by way of Scandinavia, though this is a matter on which there is much difference of opinion. Ireland's richness in gold during the Bronze Age made her "a kind of El Dorado of the western world," and the discovery of a gold torc found by Schliemann in the royal treasury in the second city of Troy raises the question as to whether the model of the torc was imported into Ireland from the south[90], or whether (which J. Dechelette[91] regards as less probable) there was already an exportation of Irish gold to the eastern Mediterranean in pre-Mycenean times.

Of recent years great strides have been made towards the establishment of a definite chronology linking the historic with the prehistoric periods in the Aegean, in Egypt and in Babylonia, and as the estimates of various authorities differ sometimes by a thousand years or so, the subjoined table will be of use to indicate the chronological schemes most commonly followed; the dates are in all cases merely approximate.

It has often been pointed out that there is no reason why iron should not have been the earliest metal to be used by man. Its ores are more abundant and more easily reduced than any others, and are worked by peoples in a low grade of culture at the present day[92]. Iron may have been known in Egypt almost as early as bronze, for a piece in the British Museum is attributed to the fourth dynasty, and some beads of manufactured iron were found in a pre-dynastic grave at El Gerzeh[93]. But these and other less well authenticated occurrences of iron are rare, and the metal was not common in Egypt before the middle of the second millennium. By the end of the second millennium the knowledge had spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean[94], and towards 900 at latest iron was in common use in Italy and Central Europe.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

Egypt[95] Babylonia[96] Aegean[97] Greece[98] Bronze Age in Europe[99]

3300 Dynasty I 3200 3100 3000 Dynasty of Opis ?Early ?Pre-Mycenean 2900 Dyn. of Kish Minoan I 2800 Dyn. III, Dyn. of Erech IV Dyn. of Akkad[100] 2700 2600 Dyn. V 2nd Dyn. of Erech 2500 Dyn. VI Gutian Early Minoan II Period I. Domination Eneolithic 2400 Dyn. of Ur (implements 2300 Dyn. IX of stone, 2200 Dyn. of Isin Middle Minoan I copper and 2100 Dyn. XI Mid. Minoan II bronze, poor 2000 Dyn. XII 1st Dyn. Babylon Mycenean I in tin) 1900 2nd Dyn. Mid. Minoan III Period II 1800 1700 Dyn. XIII 3rd Dyn. Late Minoan I 1600 Dyn. XV Period III 1500 Dyn. XVIII Late Minoan Mycenean II II 1400 Late Minoan III 1300 Dyn. XIX Period IV 1200 Dyn. XX Homeric Age 1100 4th Dyn. 1000 Dyn. XXI 5th to 7th Dyn. Close of Bronze Age[101] 900 Dyn. XXII 8th Dyn. Hallstatt

The introduction of iron into Italy has often been attributed to the Etruscans, who were thought to have brought the knowledge from Lydia. But the most abundant remains of the Early Iron Age are found not in Tuscany, but along the coasts of the Adriatic[102], showing that iron followed the well-known route of the amber trade, thus reaching Central Europe and Hallstatt (which has given its name to the Early Iron Age), where alone in Europe the gradual transition from the use of bronze to that of iron has been clearly traced. W. Ridgeway[103] believes that the use of iron was first discovered in the Hallstatt area and that thence it spread to Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Aegean area, and Egypt rather than that the culture drift was in the opposite direction. There is no difference of opinion however as to the importance of this Central European area which contained the most famous iron mines of antiquity. Hallstatt culture extended from the Iberian peninsula in the west to Hungary in the east, but scarcely reached Scandinavia, North Germany, Armorica or the British Isles where the Bronze Age may be said to have lasted down to about 500 B.C. Over such a vast domain the culture was not everywhere of a uniform type and Hoernes[104] recognises four geographical divisions distinguished mainly by pottery and fibulae, and provisionally classified as Illyrian in the South West, or Adriatic region, in touch with Greece and Italy; Celtic in the Central or Danubian area; with an off-shoot in Western Germany, Northern Switzerland and Eastern France; and Germanic in parts of Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Posen.

The Hallstatt period ends, roughly, at 500 B.C., and the Later Iron Age takes its name from the settlement of La Tene, in a bay of the Lake of Neuchatel in Switzerland. This culture, while owing much to that of Hallstatt, and much also to foreign sources, possesses a distinct individuality, and though soon overpowered on the Continent by Roman influence, attained a remarkable brilliance in the Late Celtic period in the British Isles.

That the peoples of the Metal Ages were physically well developed, and in a great part of Europe and Asia already of Aryan speech, there can be no reasonable doubt. A skull of the early Hallstatt period, from a grave near Wildenroth, Upper Bavaria, is described by Virchow as long-headed, with a cranial capacity of no less than 1585 c.c., strongly developed occiput, very high and narrow face and nose, and in every respect a superb specimen of the regular-featured, long-headed North European[105]. But owing to the prevalence of cremation the evidence of race is inadequate. The Hallstatt population was undoubtedly mixed, and at Glasinatz in Bosnia, another site of Hallstatt civilisation, about a quarter of the skulls examined were brachycephalic[106].

Their works, found in great abundance in the graves, especially of the Bronze and Iron periods, but a detailed account of which belongs to the province of archaeology, interest us in many ways. The painted earthenware vases and incised metal-ware of all kinds enable the student to follow the progress of the arts of design and ornamentation in their upward development from the first tentative efforts of the prehistoric artist at pleasing effects. Human and animal figures, though rarely depicted, occasionally afford a curious insight into the customs and fashions of the times. On a clay vessel, found in 1896 at Lahse in Posen, is figured a regular hunting scene, where we see men mounted on horseback, or else on foot, armed with bow and arrow, pursuing the quarry (nobly-antlered stags), and returning to the penthouse after the chase[107]. The drawing is extremely primitive, but on that account all the more instructive, showing in connection with analogous representations on contemporary objects, how in prehistoric art such figures tend to become conventionalised and purely ornamental, as in similar designs on the vases and textiles from the Ancon Necropolis, Peru. "Most ornaments of primitive peoples, although to our eye they may seem merely geometrical and freely-invented designs, are in reality nothing more than degraded animal and human figures[108]."

This may perhaps be the reason why so many of the drawings of the metal period appear so inferior to those of the cave-dwellers and of the present Bushmen. They are often mere conventionalised reductions of pictorial prototypes, comparable, for instance, to the characters of our alphabets, which are known to be degraded forms of earlier pictographs.

Of the so-called "Prehistoric Age" it is obvious that no strict definition can be given. It comprises in a general way that vague period prior to all written records, dim memories of which--popular myths, folklore, demi-gods[109], eponymous heroes[110], traditions of real events[111]--lingered on far into historic times, and supplied ready to hand the copious materials afterwards worked up by the early poets, founders of new religions, and later legislators.

That letters themselves, although not brought into general use, had already been invented, is evident from the mere fact that all memory of their introduction beyond the vaguest traditions had died out before the dawn of history. The works of man, while in themselves necessarily continuous, stretched back to such an inconceivably remote past, that even the great landmarks in the evolution of human progress had long been forgotten by later generations.

And so it was everywhere, in the New World as in the Old, amongst Eastern as amongst Western Peoples. In the Chinese records the "Age of the Five Emperors"--five, though nine are named--answers somewhat to our prehistoric epoch. It had its eponymous hero, Fu Hi, reputed founder of the empire, who invented nets and snares for fishing and hunting, and taught his people how to rear domestic animals. To him also is ascribed the institution of marriage, and in his time Tsong Chi is supposed to have invented the Chinese characters, symbols, not of sounds, but of objects and ideas.

Then came other benevolent rulers, who taught the people agriculture, established markets for the sale of farm produce, discovered the medicinal properties of plants, wrote treatises on diseases and their remedies, studied astrology and astronomy, and appointed "the Five Observers of the heavenly bodies."

But this epoch had been preceded by the "Age of the Three [six] Rulers," when people lived in caves, ate wild fruits and uncooked food, drank the blood of animals and wore the skins of wild beasts (our Old Stone Age). Later they grew less rude, learned to obtain fire by friction, and built themselves habitations of wood or foliage (our Early Neolithic Age). Thus is everywhere revealed the background of sheer savagery, which lies behind all human culture, while the "Golden Age" of the poets fades with the "Hesperides" and Plato's "Atlantis" into the region of the fabulous.

Little need here be said of strictly historic times, the most characteristic feature of which is perhaps the general use of letters. By means of this most fruitful of human inventions, everything worth preserving was perpetuated, and thus all useful knowledge tended to become accumulative. It is no longer possible to say when or where the miracle was wrought by which the apparently multifarious sounds of fully-developed languages were exhaustively analysed and effectively expressed by a score or so of arbitrary signs. But a comparative study of the various writing-systems in use in different parts of the world has revealed the process by which the transition was gradually brought about from rude pictorial representations of objects to purely phonetical symbols.

As is clearly shown by the "winter counts" of the North American aborigines, and by the prehistoric rock carvings in Upper Egypt, the first step was a pictograph, the actual figure, say, of a man, standing for a given man, and then for any man or human being. Then this figure, more or less reduced or conventionalised, served to indicate not only the term man, but the full sound man, as in the word manifest, and in the modern rebus. At this stage it becomes a phonogram, or phonoglyph, which, when further reduced beyond all recognition of its original form, may stand for the syllable ma as in ma-ny, without any further reference either to the idea or the sound man. The phonogram has now become the symbol of a monosyllable, which is normally made up of two elements, a consonant and a vowel, as in the Devanagari, and other syllabic systems.

Lastly, by dropping the second or vowel element the same symbol, further modified or not, becomes a letter representing the sound m, that is, one of the few ultimate elements of articulate speech. A more or less complete set of such characters, thus worn down in form and meaning, will then be available for indicating more or less completely all the phonetic elements of any given language. It will be a true alphabet, the wonderful nature of which may be inferred from the fact that only two, or possibly three, such alphabetic systems are known with absolute certainty to have ever been independently evolved by human ingenuity[112]. From the above exposition we see how inevitably the Phoenician parent of nearly all late alphabets expressed at first the consonantal sounds only, so that the vowels or vowel marks are in all cases later developments, as in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, the Italic group, and the Runes.

In primitive systems, such as the Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, Maya-Quiche and Mexican, one or more of the various transitional steps may be developed and used simultaneously, with a constant tendency to advance on the lines above indicated, by gradual substitution of the later for the earlier stages. A comparison of the Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic systems brings out some curious results. Thus at an extremely remote epoch, some millenniums ago, the Sumerians had already got rid of the pictorial, and to a great extent of the ideographic, but had barely reached the alphabetic phase. Consequently their cuneiform groups, although possessing phonetic value, mainly express full syllables, scarcely ever letters, and rarely complete words. Ideographs had given place first to phonograms and then to mere syllables, "complex syllables in which several consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and one vowel or vice versa[113]."

The Egyptians, on the other hand, carried the system right through the whole gamut from pictures to letters, but retained all the intermediate phases, the initial tending to fall away, the final to expand, while the bulk of the hieroglyphs represented in various degrees the several transitional states. In many cases they "had kept only one part of the syllable, namely a mute consonant; they detached, for instance, the final u from bu and pu, and gave only the values b and p to the human leg [Hieroglyph Symbol] and to the mat [Hieroglyph Symbol]. The peoples of the Euphrates stopped half way, and admitted actual letters for the vowel sounds a, i and u only[114]."

In the process of evolution, metaphor and analogy of course played a large part, as in the evolution of language itself. Thus a lion might stand both for the animal and for courage, and so on. The first essays in phonetics took somewhat the form of a modern rebus, thus: [Hieroglyph Symbol] = khau = sieve, [Hieroglyph Symbol] = pu = mat; [Hieroglyph Symbol] = ru = mouth, whence [Hieroglyph Symbol] = kho-pi-ru = to be, where the sounds and not the meaning of the several components are alone attended to[115].

By analogous processes was formed a true alphabet, in which, however, each of the phonetic elements was represented at first by several different characters derived from several different words having the same initial syllable. Here was, therefore, an embarras de richesses, which could be got rid of only by a judicious process of elimination, that is, by discarding all like-sounding symbols but one for the same sound. When this final process of reduction was completed by the scribes, in other words, when all the phonetic signs were rejected except 23, i.e. one for each of the 23 phonetic elements, the Phoenician alphabet as we now have it was completed. Such may be taken as the real origin of this system, whether the scribes in question were Babylonians, Egyptians, Minaeans, or Europeans, that is, whether the Phoenician alphabet had a cuneiform, a hieroglyphic, a South Arabian, a Cretan (Aegean), Ligurian or Iberian origin, for all these and perhaps other peoples have been credited with the invention. The time is not yet ripe for deciding between these rival claimants[116].

But whatever be the source of the Phoenician, that of the Persian system current under the Achaemenides is clear enough. It is a true alphabet of 37 characters, derived by some selective process directly from the Babylonian cuneiforms, without any attempt at a modification of their shapes. Hence although simple compared with its prototype, it is clumsy enough compared with the Phoenician script, several of the letters requiring groups of as many as four or even five "wedges" for their expression. None of the other cuneiform systems also derived from the Sumerian (the Assyrian, Elamite, Vannic, Medic) appear to have reached the pure alphabetic state, all being still encumbered with numerous complex syllabic characters. The subjoined table, for which I have to thank T. G. Pinches, will help to show the genesis of the cuneiform combinations from the earliest known pictographs. These pictographs themselves are already reduced to the merest outlines of the original pictorial representations. But no earlier forms, showing the gradual transition from the primitive picture writing to the degraded pictographs here given, have yet come to light[117].

Here it may be asked, What is to be thought of the already-mentioned pebble-markings from the Mas-d'Azil Cave at the close of the Old Stone Age? If they are truly phonetic, then we must suppose that palaeolithic man not only invented an alphabetic writing system, but did this right off by intuition, as it were, without any previous knowledge of letters. At least no one will suggest that the Dordogne cave-dwellers were already in possession of pictographic or other crude systems, from which the Mas-d'Azil "script" might have been slowly evolved. Yet E. Piette, who groups these pebbles, painted with peroxide of iron, in the four categories of numerals, symbols, pictographs, and alphabetical characters, states, in reference to these last, that 13 out of 23 Phoenician characters were equally Azilian graphic signs. He even suggests that there may be an approach to an inscription in one group, where, however, the mark indicating a stop implies a script running Semitic-fashion from right to left, whereas the letters themselves seem to face the other way[118]. G. G. MacCurdy[119], who accepts the evidence for the existence of writing in Azilian, if not in Magdalenian times, notes the close similarity between palaeolithic signs and Phoenician, ancient Greek and Cypriote letters. But J. Dechelette[120], reviewing (pp. 234, 236) the arguments against Piette's claims, points out in conclusion (p. 320) the impossibility of admitting that the population of Gaul could suddenly lose so beneficial a discovery as that of writing. Yet thousands of years elapse before the earliest appearance of epigraphic monuments.

A possible connection has been suggested by Sergi between the Mas-d'Azil signs and the markings that have been discovered on the megalithic monuments of North Africa, Brittany, and the British Isles. These are all so rudimentary that resemblances are inevitable, and of themselves afford little ground for necessary connections. Primitive man is but a child, and all children bawl and scrawl much in the same way. Nevertheless C. Letourneau[121] has taken the trouble to compare five such scrawls from "Libyan inscriptions" now in the Bardo Museum, Tunis, with similar or identical signs on Brittany and Irish dolmens. There is the familiar circle plain and dotted [Symbol] [Symbol], the cross in its simplest form [Symbol], the pothook and segmented square [Symbol], all of which recur in the Phoenician, Keltiberian, Etruscan, Libyan or Tuareg systems. Letourneau, however, who does not call them letters but only "signes alphabetiformes," merely suggests that, if not phonetic marks when first carved on the neolithic monuments, they may have become so in later times. Against this it need only be urged that in later times all these peoples were supplied with complete alphabetic systems from the East as soon as they required them. By that time all the peoples of the culture-zone were well-advanced into the historic period, and had long forgotten the rude carvings of their neolithic forefathers.

Armed with a nearly perfect writing system, and the correlated cultural appliances, the higher races soon took a foremost place in the general progress of mankind, and gradually acquired a marked ascendancy, not only over the less cultured populations of the globe, but in large measure over the forces of nature herself. With the development of navigation and improved methods of locomotion, inland seas, barren wastes, and mountain ranges ceased to be insurmountable obstacles to their movements, which within certain limits have never been arrested throughout all recorded time.

Thus, during the long ages following the first peopling of the earth by pleistocene man, fresh settlements and readjustments have been continually in progress, although wholesale displacements must be regarded as rare events. With few exceptions, the later migrations, whether hostile or peaceful, were, for reasons already stated[122], generally of a partial character, while certain insular regions, such as America and Australia, remained little affected by such movements till quite recent times. But for the inhabitants of the eastern hemisphere the results were none the less far-reaching. Continuous infiltrations could not fail ultimately to bring about great modifications of early types, while the ever-active principle of convergence tended to produce a general uniformity amongst the new amalgams. Thus the great varietal divisions, though undergoing slow changes from age to age, continued, like all other zoological groups, to maintain a distinct regional character.

Flinders Petrie has acutely observed that the only meaning the term "race" now can have is that of a group of human beings, whose type has become unified by their rate of assimilation exceeding the rate of change produced by foreign elements[123]. We are also reminded by Gustavo Tosti that "in the actual state of science the word 'race' is a vague formula, to which nothing definite may be found to correspond. On the one hand, the original races can only be said to belong to palaeontology, while the more limited groups, now called races, are nothing but peoples, or societies of peoples, brethren by civilization more than by blood. The race thus conceived ends by identifying itself with nationality[124]." Hence it has been asked why, on the principle of convergence, a fusion of various races, if isolated long enough in a given area, may not eventually lead to a new racial type, without leaving any trace of its manifold origin[125].

Such new racial types would be normal for the later varietal groups, just as the old types were normal for the earlier groups, and a general application might be given to Topinard's famous dictum that les peuples seuls sont des realites[126], that is, peoples alone--groups occupying definite geographical areas--have an objective existence. Thus, the notion of race, as a zoological expression in the sense of a pure breed or strain, falls still more into the background, and, as Virchow aptly remarks, "this term, which always implied something vague, has in recent times become in the highest degree uncertain[127]."

Hence Ehrenreich treats the present populations of the earth rather as zoological groups which have been developed in their several geographical domains, and are to be distinguished not so much by their bony structure as by their external characters, such as hair, colour, and expression, and by their habitats and languages. None of these factors can be overlooked, but it would seem that the character of the hair forms the most satisfactory basis for a classification of mankind, and this has therefore been adopted for the new edition of the present work. It has the advantage of simplicity, without involving, or even implying, any particular theory of racial or geographical origins. It has stood the test of time, being proposed by Bory de Saint Vincent in 1827, and adopted by Huxley, Haeckel, Broca, Topinard and many others.

The three main varieties of hair are the straight, the wavy and the so-called woolly, termed respectively Leiotrichous, Cymotrichous and Ulotrichous[128]. Straight hair usually falls straight down, though it may curl at the ends, it is generally coarse and stiff, and is circular in section. Wavy hair is undulating, forming long curves or imperfect spirals, or closer rings or curls, and the section is more or less elliptical. Woolly hair is characterised by numerous, close, often interlocking spirals, 1-9 mm. in diameter, the section giving the form of a lengthened ellipse. Straight hair is usually the longest, and woolly hair the shortest, wavy hair occupying an intermediate position.

SCHEME OF CLASSIFICATION.

I. ULOTRICHI (Woolly-haired). 1. The African Negroes, Negrilloes, Bushmen. 2. The Oceanic Negroes: Papuans, Melanesians in part, Tasmanians, Negritoes.

II. LEIOTRICHI (Straight-haired). 1. The Southern Mongols. 2. The Oceanic Mongols, Polynesians in part. 3. The Northern Mongols. 4. The American Aborigines.

III. CYMOTRICHI (Curly or Wavy-haired). 1. The Pre-Dravidians: Vedda, Sakai, etc., Australians. 2. The "Caucasic" peoples: A. Southern Dolichocephals: Mediterraneans, Hamites, Semites, Dravidians, Indonesians, Polynesians in part. B. Northern Dolichocephals: Nordics, Kurds, Afghans, some Hindus. C. Brachycephals: Alpines, including the short Cevenoles of Western and Central Europe, and tall Adriatics or Dinarics of Eastern Europe and the Armenians of Western Asia.

FOOTNOTES:

[66] Thus Lucretius:

"Posterius ferri vis est aerisque reperta, Sed prior aeris erat quam ferri cognitus usus."

[67] J. Dechelette points out that the term Copper "Age" is not justified for the greater part of Europe, as it suggests a demarcation which does not exist and also a more thorough chemical analysis of early metals than we possess. He prefers the term aeneolithic (aeneus, copper, [Greek: lithos], stone), coined by the Italians, to denote the period of transition, dating, according to Montelius, from about 2500 B.C. to 1900 B.C. Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, II. 1, Age du Bronze, 1910, pp. 99-100, 105.

[68] Eth., Chap. XIII.

[69] See G. Elliot Smith, The Ancient Egyptians, 1911, pp. 97-8.

[70] Paper on "The Transition from Pure Copper to Bronze," etc., read at the Meeting of the Brit. Assoc. Liverpool, 1896.

[71] Loc. cit. p. 3. But cf. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, 1912, pp. 33 and 90 n. 2.

[72] G. A. Reisner, The Early Cemeteries of Naga-ed-der (University of California Publications), 1908, and Report of the Archaeological Survey of Nubia, 1907-8.

[73] "Campagnes de 1907-8," Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1908, p. 373.

[74] Cf. J. Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, II. 1, Age du Bronze, 1910, pp. 53-4.

[75] Cf. L. W. King, A History of Sumer and Akkad, 1910, p. 26.

[76] G. Coffey, The Bronze Age in Ireland, 1913, p. 6.

[77] L'Anthropologie, 1896, p. 526 sq. This antiquary aptly remarks that "l'expression age de cuivre a une signification bien precise comme s'appliquant a la partie de la periode de la pierre polie ou les metaux font leur apparition."

[78] L'Anthropologie, 1896, p. 526 sq.

[79] In Die Kupferzeit in Europa, 1886.

[80] "Neuere Studien ueber die Kupferzeit," in Zeitschr. f. Eth. 1896, No. 2.

[81] Otto Helm, "Chemische Untersuchungen vorgeschichtlicher Bronzen," in Zeitschr. f. Eth. 1897, No. 2. This authority agrees with Hampel's view that further research will confirm the suggestion that in Transylvania (Hungary) "eine Kupfer-Antimonmischung vorangegangen, welche zugleich die Bronzekultur vorbereitete" (ib. p. 128).

[82] Proc. Soc. Bib. Archaeol. 1892, pp. 223-6.

[83] For the chronology of the Copper and Bronze Ages see p. 27.

[84] Copper and tin are found together in abundance in Southern China, but this is archaeologically speaking an unknown land; "to search for the birth-place of bronze in China is therefore barren of positive results," British Museum Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age, 1904, p. 10.

[85] T. Rice Holmes, Ancient Britain, 1907, pp. 483-498.

[86] British Museum Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age, 1904, p. 10.

[87] J. de Morgan, Les Premieres Civilisations, 1909, pp. 169, 337 ff.

[88] J. Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, II. 1, Age du Bronze, 1910, pp. 98 and 397 ff.

[89] J. Dechelette, loc. cit. p. 63 n.

[90] G. Coffey, The Bronze Age in Ireland, 1913, pp. V, 78.

[91] J. Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, II. 1, Age du Bronze, 1910, p. 355 n.

[92] Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age (British Museum), 1905, p. 2.

[93] Wainwright, "Pre-dynastic iron beads in Egypt," Man, 1911, p. 177. See also H. R. Hall, "Note on the early use of iron in Egypt," Man, 1903, p. 147.

[94] W. Belck attributes the introduction of iron into Crete in 1500 B.C. to the Phoenicians, whom he derives from the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf. He suggests that these traders were already acquainted with the metal in S. Arabia in the fourth millennium, and that it was through them that a piece found its way into Egypt in the fourth dynasty. "Die Erfinder des Eisentechnik," Zeitschrift f. Ethnologie, 1910. See also F. Stuhlmann, Handwerk und Industrie in Ostafrika, 1910, p. 49 ff., who on cultural grounds derives the knowledge of iron in Africa from an Asiatic source.

[95] E. Meyer, "Aegyptische Chronologie," Abh. Berl. Akad. 1904, and "Nachtraege," ib. 1907. This chronology has been adopted by the Berlin school and others, but is unsatisfactory in allowing insufficient time for Dynasties XII to XVIII, which are known to contain 100 to 200 rulers. Flinders Petrie therefore adds another Sothic period (1461 years, calculated from Sothis or Sirius), thus throwing the earlier dynasties a millennium or two further back. Dynasty I, according to this computation starts in 5546 B.C. and Dynasty XII at 3779. H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, 1912, p. 23.

[96] L. W. King, The History of Sumer and Akkad, 1910, and "Babylonia," Hutchinson's History of the Nations, 1914.

[97] C. H. Hawes and H. Boyd Hawes, Crete the Forerunner of Greece, 1909.

[98] J. Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, II. 1, Age du Bronze, 1910, p. 61.

[99] J. Dechelette, loc. cit. p. 105 ff. based on the work of O. Montelius and P. Reinecke.

[100] The Dynasty of Akkad is often dated a millennium earlier, relying on the statement of Nabonidus (556-540 B.C.) that Naram-Sin (the traditional son of Sargon of Akkad) reigned 3200 years before him; but this statement is now known to be greatly exaggerated. See the section on chronology in the Art. "Babylonia," in Ency. Brit. 1910.

[101] Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age (British Museum), 1905, p. 1.

[102] Cf. J. Dechelette, Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, II. 2, Premier Age du Fer, 1913, pp. 546, 562-3.

[103] The Early Age of Greece, 1900, pp. 594-630.

[104] "Die Hallstattperiode," Ass. francaise p. l'av. des sciences, 1905, p. 278, and Kultur der Urzeit, III. Eisenzeit, 1912, p. 54.

[105] "Ein Schaedel aus der aelteren Hallstattzeit," in Verhandl. Berlin. Ges. f. Anthrop. 1896, pp. 243-6.

[106] Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age (British Museum), 1905, p. 8.

[107] Hans Seger, "Figuerliche Darstellungen auf schlesischen Graebgefaessen der Hallstattzeit," Globus, Nov. 20, 1897.

[108] Ibid. p. 297.

[109] Homer's [Greek: hemitheon genos andron], Il. XII. 23, if the passage is genuine.

[110] Such as the Greek Andreas, the "First Man," invented in comparatively recent times, as shown by the intrusive d in [Greek: andres] for the earlier [Greek: aneres], "men." Andreas was of course a Greek, sprung in fact from the river Peneus and the first inhabitant of the Orchomenian plain (Pausanias, IX. 34, 5).

[111] For instance, the flooding of the Thessalian plain, afterwards drained by the Peneus and repeopled by the inhabitants of the surrounding mountains (rocks, stones), whence the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who are told by the oracle to repeople the world by throwing behind them the "bones of their grandmother," that is, the "stones" of mother Earth.

[112] Such instances as George Guest's Cherokee system, and the crude attempt of a Vei (West Sudanese) Negro, if genuine, are not here in question, as both had the English alphabet to work upon. A like remark applies to the old Irish and Welsh Ogham, which are more curious than instructive, the characters, mostly mere groups of straight strokes, being obvious substitutes for the corresponding letters of the Roman alphabet, hence comparable to the cryptographic systems of Wheatstone and others.

[113] Maspero, The Dawn of Civilisation, 1898, p. 728.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Ibid. p. 233.

[116] See P. Giles, Art. "Alphabet," Ency. Brit. 1910.

[117] See A. J. Booth, The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions, 1902.

[118] L'Anthr. XV. 1904, p. 164.

[119] Recent Discoveries bearing on the Antiquity of Man in Europe (Smithsonian Report for 1909), 1910, p. 566 ff.

[120] Manuel d'Archeologie prehistorique, I. 1908.

[121] "Les signes libyques des dolmens," Bul. Soc. d'Anthrop. 1896, p. 319.

[122] Eth. Chap. XIII.

[123] Address, Meeting British Assoc. Ipswich, 1895.

[124] Amer. J. of Sociology, Jan. 1898, pp. 467-8.

[125] A. Vierkandt, Globus, 72, p. 134.

[126] Elements d'Anthropologie Generale, p. 207.

[127] Rassenbildung u. Erblichkeit; Bastian-Festschrift, 1896, p. 1.

[128] From Gk. [Greek: leios], smooth, [Greek: kuma], wave, [Greek: oulos], fleecy, and [Greek: thrix], [Greek: trichos], hair. J. Deniker (The Races of Man, 1900, p. 38) distinguishes four classes, the Australians, Nubians etc. being grouped as frizzy. He gives the corresponding terms in French and German:--straight, Fr. droit, lisse, Germ. straff, schlicht; wavy, Fr. onde, Germ. wellig; frizzy, Fr. frise, Germ. lockig; woolly, Fr. crepu, Germ. kraus.

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III. THE AFRICAN NEGRO: I. SUDANESE

Conspectus--The Negro-Caucasic "Great Divide"--The Negro Domain-- Negro Origins--Persistence of the Negro Type--Two Main Sections: Sudanese and Bantus--Contrasts and Analogies--Sudanese and Bantu Linguistic Areas--The "Drum Language"--West Sudanese Groups--The Wolofs: Primitive Speech and Pottery; Religious Notions--The Mandingans: Culture and Industries; History; the Guine and Mali Empires--The Felups: Contrasts between the Inland and Coast Peoples; Felup Type and Mental Characters--Timni--African Freemasonry--The Sierra Leonese--Social Relations--The Liberians--The Krumen--The Upper Guinea Peoples--Table of the Gold Coast and Slave Coast Tribes--Ashanti Folklore--Fetishism; its true inwardness--Ancestry Worship and the "Customs"--The Benin Bronzes--The Mossi--African Agnostics--Central Sudanese--General Ethnical and Social Relations--The Songhai--Domain--Origins-- Egyptian Theories--Songhai Records--The Hausas--Dominant Social Position--Speech and Mental Qualities--Origins--Kanembu; Kanuri; Baghirmi; Mosgu--Ethnical and Political Relations in the Chad Basin--The Aborigines--Islam and Heathendom--Slave-Hunting--Arboreal Strongholds--Mosgu Types and Contrasts--The Cultured Peoples of Central Sudan--Kanem-Bornu Records--Eastern Sudanese--Range of the Negro in Eastern Sudan--The Mabas--Ethnical Relations in Wadai-- The Nubas--The Nubian Problem--Nubian Origins and Affinities-- The Negro Peoples of the Nile-Congo Watersheds--Political Relations--Two Physical Types--The Dinka--Linguistic Groups-- Mental Qualities--Cannibalism--The African Cannibal Zone--Arts and Industries--High Appreciation of Pictorial Art--Sense of Humour.

CONSPECTUS OF SUDANESE NEGROES.

#Present Range.# Africa south of the Sahara, less Abyssinia, Galla, Somali and Masai lands; Tripolitana, Mauritania and Egypt sporadically; several of the southern United States; West Indies; Guiana; parts of Brazil and Peru.

#Hair#, always black, rather short, and crisp, frizzly or woolly, flat in transverse section; #skin-colour#, very dark brown or chocolate and blackish, never quite black; #skull#, generally dolichocephalous (index 72); #jaws#, prognathous; #cheek-bone#, rather small, moderately retreating, rarely prominent; #nose#, very broad at base, flat, small, platyrrhine; #eyes#, large, round, prominent, black with yellowish cornea; #stature#, usually tall, 1.78 m. (5 ft. 10 in.); #lips#, often tumid and everted; #arms#, disproportionately long; #legs#, slender with small calves; #feet#, broad, flat, with low instep and larkspur heel.

#Temperament#, sensuous, indolent, improvident; fitful, passionate and cruel, though often affectionate and faithful; little sense of dignity, and slight self-consciousness, hence easy acceptance of yoke of slavery; musical.

#Speech#, almost everywhere in the agglutinating state, generally with suffixes.

#Religion#, anthropomorphic; spirits endowed with human attributes, mostly evil and more powerful than man; ancestry-worship, fetishism, and witchcraft very prevalent; human sacrifices to the dead a common feature.

#Culture#, low; cannibalism formerly rife, perhaps universal, still general in some regions; no science or letters; arts and industries confined mainly to agriculture, pottery, wood-carving, weaving, and metallurgy; no perceptible progress anywhere except under the influence of higher races.

Main[129] Divisions.

#West Sudanese#: Wolof; Mandingan; Felup; Timni; Kru; Sierra Leonese; Liberian; Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba; Ibo; Efik; Borgu; Mossi.

#Central Sudanese#: Songhai; Hausa; Mosgu; Kanembu; Kanuri; Baghirmi; Yedina.

#East Sudanese#: Maba; Fur; Nuba; Shilluk; Dinka; Bari; Abaka; Bongo; Mangbattu; Zandeh; Momfu; Base; Barea.

* * * * *

From the anthropological standpoint Africa falls into two distinct sections, where the highest (Caucasic) and the lowest (Negro) divisions of mankind have been conterminous throughout all known time. Mutual encroachments and interpenetrations have probably been continuous, and indeed are still going on. Yet so marked is the difference between the two groups, and such is the tenacity with which each clings to its proper domain, that, despite any very distinct geographical frontiers, the ethnological parting line may still be detected. Obliterated at one or two points, and at others set back always in favour of the higher division, it may be followed from the Atlantic coast along the course of the Senegal river east by north to the great bend of the Niger at Timbuktu; then east by south to Lake Chad, beyond which it runs nearly due east to Khartum, at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles.

From this point the now isolated Negro groups (Base and Barea), on the northern slope of the Abyssinian plateau, show that the original boundary was at first continued still east to the Red Sea at or about Massowa. But for many ages the line appears to have been deflected from Khartum along the White Nile south to the Sobat confluence, then continuously south-eastwards round by the Sobat Valley to the Albert Nyanza, up the Somerset Nile to the Victoria Nyanza, and thence with a considerable southern bend round Masailand eastwards to the Indian Ocean at the equator.

All the land north of this irregular line belongs to the Hamito-Semitic section of the Caucasic division, all south of it to the western (African) section of the Ulotrichous division. Throughout this region--which comprises the whole of Sudan from the Atlantic to the White Nile, and all south of Sudan except Abyssinia, Galla, Somali and Masai lands--the African Negro, clearly, distinguished from the other main groups by the above summarised physical[130] and mental qualities, largely predominates everywhere and in many places exclusively. The route by which he probably reached these intertropical lands, where he may be regarded as practically indigenous, has been indicated in Ethnology, Chs. X. and XI.

As regards the date of this occupation, nothing can be clearly proved. "The history of Africa reaches back but a short distance, except, of course, as far as the lower Nile Valley and Roman Africa is concerned; elsewhere no records exist, save tribal traditions, and these only relate to very recent events. Even archaeology, which can often sketch the main outlines of a people's history, is here practically powerless, owing to the insufficiency of data. It is true that stone implements of palaeolithic and neolithic types are found sporadically in the Nile Valley[131], Somaliland, on the Zambesi, in Cape Colony and the northern portions of the Congo Free State, as well as in Algeria and Tunisia; but the localities are far too few and too widely separated to warrant the inference that they are to be in any way connected. Moreover, where stone implements are found they are, as a rule, very near, even actually on, the surface of the earth," and they are rarely, if ever, found in association with bones of extinct animals. "Nothing occurs resembling the regular stratification of Europe, and consequently no argument based on geological grounds is possible[132]." The exceptions are the lower Nile and Zambesi where true palaeoliths have been found not only on the surface (which in this case is not inconsistent with great antiquity) but also in stratified gravel. Implements of palaeolithic type are doubtless common, and may be compared to Chellean, Mousterian and even Solutrian specimens[133], but primitive culture is not necessarily pleistocene. Ancient forms persisted in Egypt down to the historic period, and even patination is no sure test of age, so until further evidence is found the antiquity of man in Africa must remain undecided[134].

Yet since some remote if undated epoch the specialised Negro type, as depicted on the Egyptian monuments some thousands of years ago[135], has everywhere been maintained with striking uniformity. "Within this wide domain of the black Negro there is a remarkably general similarity of type.... If you took a Negro from the Gold Coast of West Africa and passed him off amongst a number of Nyasa natives, and if he were not remarkably distinguished from them by dress or tribal marks, it would not be easy to pick him out[136]."

Nevertheless considerable differences are perceptible to the practised eye, and the contrasts are sufficiently marked to justify ethnologists in treating the Sudanese and the Bantu as two distinct subdivisions of the family. In both groups the relatively full-blood natives are everywhere very much alike, and the contrasts are presented chiefly amongst the mixed or Negroid populations. In Sudan the disturbing elements are both Hamitic (Berbers and Tuaregs) and Semitic (Arabs); while in Bantuland they are mainly Hamitic (Galla) in all the central and southern districts, and Arabs on the eastern seaboard from the equator to Sofala beyond the Zambesi. To the varying proportions of these several ingredients may perhaps be traced the often very marked differences observable on the one hand between such Sudanese peoples as the Wolof, Mandingans, Hausa, Nubians, Zandeh[137], and Mangbattu, and on the other between all these and the Swahili, Baganda, Zulu-Xosa, Be-Chuana, Ova-Herero and some other Negroid Bantu.

But the distinction is based on social, linguistic, and cultural, as well as on physical grounds, so that, as at present constituted, the Sudanese and Bantu really constitute two tolerably well-defined branches of the Negro family. Thanks to Muhammadan influences, the former have attained a much higher level of culture. They cultivate not only the alimentary but also the economic plants, such as cotton and indigo; they build stone dwellings, walled towns, substantial mosques and minarets; they have founded powerful states, such as those of the Hausa and Songhai, of Ghana and Bornu, with written records going back a thousand years, although these historical peoples are all without exception half-breeds, often with more Semitic and Hamitic than Negro blood in their veins.

No such cultured peoples are anywhere to be found in Bantuland except on the east coast, where the "Moors" founded great cities and flourishing marts centuries before the appearance of the Portuguese in the eastern seas. Among the results of the gold trade with these coastal settlements may be classed the Zimbabwe monuments and other ruins explored by Theodore Bent in the mining districts south of the Zambesi. But in all the Negro lands free from foreign influences no true culture has ever been developed, and here cannibalism, witchcraft, and sanguinary "customs" are often still rife, or have been but recently suppressed by the direct action of European administrations.

Numberless authorities have described the Negro as unprogressive, or, if left to himself, incapable of progress in his present physical environment. Sir H. H. Johnston, who knows him well, goes much further, and speaks of him as a fine animal, who, "in his wild state, exhibits a stunted mind and a dull content with his surroundings, which induces mental stagnation, cessation of all upward progress, and even retrogression towards the brute. In some respects I think the tendency of the Negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one[138]."

There is one point in which the Bantu somewhat unaccountably compare favourably with the Sudanese. In all other regions the spread of culture has tended to bring about linguistic unity, as we see in the Hellenic world, where all the old idioms were gradually absorbed in the "common dialect" of the Byzantine empire, again in the Roman empire, where Latin became the universal speech of the West, and lastly in the Muhammadan countries, where most of the local tongues have nearly everywhere, except in Sudan, disappeared before the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages.

But in Negroland the case is reversed, and here the less cultured Bantu populations all, without any known exception, speak dialects of a single mother-tongue, while the greatest linguistic confusion prevails amongst the semi-civilised as well as the savage peoples of Sudan.

Although the Bantu language may, as some suppose[139], have originated in the north and spread southwards to the Congo, Zambesi, and Limpopo basins, it cannot now be even remotely affiliated to any one of the numerous distinct forms of speech current in the Sudanese domain. Hence to allow time for its diffusion over half the continent, the initial movement must be assigned to an extremely remote epoch, and a corresponding period of great duration must be postulated for the profound linguistic disintegration that is everywhere witnessed in the region between the Atlantic and Abyssinia. Here agglutination, both with prefixed and postfixed particles, is the prevailing morphological order, as in the Mandingan, Fulah, Nubian, Dinkan, and Mangbattu groups. But every shade of transition is also presented between true agglutination and inflection of the Hamito-Semitic types, as in Hausa, Kanuri, Kanem, Dasa or Southern and Teda or Northern Tibu[140].

Elsewhere, and especially in Upper Guinea, the originally agglutinating tongues have developed on lines analogous to those followed by Tibetan, Burmese, Chinese, and Otomi in other continents, with corresponding results. Thus the Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba, surviving members of a now extinct stock-language, formerly diffused over the whole region between Cape Palmas and the Niger Delta, have become so burdened with monosyllabic homophones (like-sounding monosyllables), that to indicate their different meanings several distinguishing tones have been evolved, exactly as in the Indo-Chinese group. In Ewe (Slave Coast) the root do, according as it is toned may mean to put, let go, tell, kick, be sad, join, change, grow big, sleep, prick, or grind. So great are the ravages of phonetic decay, that new expedients have been developed to express quite simple ideas, as in Tshi (Gold Coast) addanmu, room (addan house, mu interior); akwancherifo, a guide (akwan road, cheri to show, fo person); ensahtsiabah, finger (ensah hand, tsia small, abbah child = hand's-little-child); but middle-finger = "hand's-little-chief" (ensahtsiahin, where ehin chief takes the place of abbah child[141]).

Common both to Sudanese and Bantus, especially about the western borderlands (Upper Guinea, Cameruns, etc.) is the "drum-language," which affords a striking illustration of the Negro's musical faculty. "Two or three drums are usually used together, each producing a different note, and they are played either with the fingers or with two sticks. The lookers-on generally beat time by clapping the hands. To a European, whose ear and mind are untrained for this special faculty, the rhythm of a drum expresses nothing beyond a repetition of the same note at different intervals of time; but to a native it expresses much more. To him the drum can and does speak, the sounds produced from it forming words, and the whole measure or rhythm a sentence. In this way, when company drums are being played at an ehsadu [palaver], they are made to express and convey to the bystanders a variety of meanings. In one measure they abuse the men of another company, stigmatising them as fools and cowards; then the rhythm changes, and the gallant deeds of their own company are extolled. All this, and much more, is conveyed by the beating of drums, and the native ear and mind, trained to select and interpret each beat, is never at fault. The language of drums is as well understood as that which they use in their daily life. Each chief has his own call or motto, sounded by a particular beat of his drums. Those of Amankwa Tia, the Ashanti general who fought against us in the war of 1873-4, used to say P[)i]r[)i]h[=u]h, hasten. Similar mottoes are also expressed by means of horns, and an entire stranger in the locality can at once translate the rhythm into words[142]."

Similar contrasts and analogies will receive due illustration in the detailed account here following of the several more representative Sudanese groups.

WEST SUDANESE.

Wolofs. Throughout its middle and lower course the Senegal river, which takes its name from the Zenaga Berbers, forms the ethnical "divide" between the Hamites and the Sudanese Negroes. The latter are here represented by the Wolofs, who with the kindred Jolofs and Serers occupy an extensive territory between the Senegal and the Gambia rivers. Whether the term "Wolof" means "Talkers," as if they alone were gifted with the faculty of speech, or "Blacks" in contrast to the neighbouring "Red" Fulahs, both interpretations are fully justified by these Senegambians, at once the very blackest and amongst the most garrulous tribes in the whole of Africa. The colour is called "ebony," and they are commonly spoken of as "Blacks of the Black." They are also very tall even for Negroes, and the Serers especially may claim to be "the Patagonians of the Old World," men six feet six inches high and proportionately muscular being far from rare in the coast districts about St Louis and Dakar.

Their language, which is widespread throughout Senegambia, may be taken as a typical Sudanese form of speech, unlike any other in its peculiar agglutinative structure, and unaffected even in its vocabulary by the Hamitic which has been current for ages on the opposite bank of the Senegal. A remarkable feature is the so-called "article," always postfixed and subject to a two-fold series of modifications, first in accordance with the initial consonant of the noun, for which there are six possible consonantal changes (w, m, b, d, s, g), and then according as the object is present, near, not near, and distant, for which there are again four possible vowel changes (i, u, o, a), or twenty-four altogether, a tremendous redundancy of useless variants as compared with the single English form the. Thus this Protean particle begins with b, d or w to agree with baye, father, digene, woman, or fos, horse, and then becomes bi, bu, bo, ba; di, du etc.; wi, wu etc. to express the presence and the varying distances of these objects: baye-bi = father-the-here; baye-bu = father-the-there; baye-bo = father-the-yonder; baye-ba = father-the-away in the distance.

All this is curious enough; but the important point is that it probably gives us the clue to the enigmatic alliterative system of the Bantu languages as explained in Ethnology, p. 273, the position of course being reversed. Thus as in Zulu in- kose requires en- kulu, so in Wolof baye requires bi, _di_gene di, and so on. There are other indications that the now perfected Bantu grew out of analogous but less developed processes still prevalent in the Sudanese tongues.

Equally undeveloped is the Wolof process of making earthenware, as observed by M. F. Regnault amongst the natives brought to Paris for the Exhibition of 1895. He noticed how one of the women utilised a somewhat deep bowl resting on the ground in such a way as to be easily spun round by the hand, thus illustrating the transition between hand-made and turned pottery. Kneading a lump of clay, and thrusting it into the bowl, after sprinkling the sides with some black dust to prevent sticking, she made a hollow in the mass, enlarging and pressing it against the bowl with the back of the fingers bent in, the hand being all the time kept in a vertical position. At the same time the bowl was spun round with the left palm, this movement combined with the pressure exerted by the right hand causing the sides of the vessel to rise and take shape. When high enough it was finished off by thickening the clay to make a rim. This was held in the right hand and made fast to the mouth of the vessel by the friction caused by again turning the bowl with the left hand. This transitional process is frequently met with in Africa[143].

Most of the Wolofs profess themselves Muhammadans, the rest Catholics, while all alike are heathen at heart; only the former have charms with texts from the Koran which they cannot read, and the latter medals and scapulars of the "Seven Dolours" or of the Trinity, which they cannot understand. Many old rites still flourish, the household gods are not forgotten, and for the lizard, most popular of tutelar deities, the customary milk-bowl is daily replenished. Glimpses are thus afforded of the totemic system which still survives in a modified form amongst the Be-Chuana, the Mandingans, and several other African peoples, but has elsewhere mostly died out in Negroland. The infantile ideas associated with plant and animal totem tokens have been left far behind, when a people like the Serers have arrived at such a lofty conception as Takhar, god of justice, or even the more materialistic Tiurakh, god of wealth, although the latter may still be appealed to for success in nefarious projects which he himself might scarcely be expected to countenance. But the harmony between religious and ethical thought has scarcely yet been reached even amongst some of the higher races.

Mandingans. In the whole of Sudan there is scarcely a more numerous or widespread people than the Mandingans, who--with their endless ramifications, Kassonke, Jallonke, Soninke, Bambara, Vei and many others--occupy most of the region between the Atlantic and the Joliba (Upper Niger) basin, as far south as about 9 deg. N. latitude. Within these limits it is often difficult to say who are, or who are not members of this great family, whose various branches present all the transitional shades of physical type and culture grades between the true pagan Negro and the Muhammadan Negroid Sudanese.

Even linguistic unity exists only to a limited extent, as the numerous dialects of the Mande stock-language have often diverged so greatly as to constitute independent tongues quite unintelligible to the neighbouring tribes. The typical Mandingans, however--Faidherbe's Malinka-Soninke group--may be distinguished from the surrounding populations by their more softened features, broader forehead, larger nose, fuller beard, and lighter colour. They are also distinguished by their industrious habits and generally higher culture, being rivalled by few as skilled tillers of the soil, weavers, and workers in iron and copper. They thus hold much the same social position in the west that the Hausa do in the central region beyond the Niger, and the French authorities think that "they are destined to take a position of ever increasing importance in the pacified Sudan of the future[144]."

Thus history brings about its revenges, for the Mandingans proper of the Kong plateau may fairly claim, despite their late servitude to the Fulah conquerors and their present ready acceptance of French rule, to be a historical people with a not inglorious record of over 1000 years, as founders of the two great empires of Melle and Guine, and of the more recent states of Moasina, Bambara, Kaarta, Kong, and others about the water-parting between the head-streams of the Niger, and the rivers flowing south to the Gulf of Guinea. Here is the district of Manding, which is the original home of the Manding'ke, i.e. "People of Manding," as they are generally called, although Mande appears to be the form used by themselves[145]. Here also was the famous city of Mali or Melle, from which the Upper Niger group take the name of Mali'nke, in contradistinction to the Soni'nke of the Senegal river, the Jalo'nke of Futa-Jallon, and the Bamana of Bambara, these being the more important historical and cultured groups.

According to native tradition and the annals of Ahmed Baba, rescued from oblivion by Barth[146], the first Mandingan state of Guine (Ghana, Ghanata), a name still surviving in the vague geographical term "Guinea," goes back to pre-Muhammadan times. Wakayamangha, its legendary founder, is supposed to have flourished 300 years before the Hejira, at which date twenty-two kings had already reigned. Sixty years after that time the Moslem Arabs or Berbers are said to have already reached West Sudan, where they had twelve mosques in Ghana, first capital of the empire, and their chief stronghold till the foundation of Jinni on the Upper Niger (1043 A.D.).

Two centuries later (1235-60) the centre of the Mandingan rule was transferred to Mali, which under the great king Mansa-Musa (1311-31) became the most powerful Sudanese state of which there is any authentic record. For a time it included nearly the whole of West Sudan, and a great part of the western Sahara, beside the Songhai State with its capital Gogo, and Timbuktu. Mansa-Musa, who, in the language of the chronicler, "wielded a power without measure or limits," entered into friendly relations with the emperor of Morocco, and made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca, the splendours of which still linger in the memory of the Mussulman populations through whose lands the interminable procession wound its way. He headed 60,000 men of arms, says Ahmed Baba, and wherever he passed he was preceded by 500 slaves, each bearing a gold stick weighing 500 mitkals (14 lbs.), the whole representing a money value of about L4,000,000 (?). The people of Cairo and Mecca were dazzled by his wealth and munificence; but during the journey a great part of his followers were seized by a painful malady called in their language tuat, and this word still lives in the Oasis of Tuat, where most of them perished.

Even after the capture of Timbuktu by the Tuaregs (1433), Mali long continued to be the chief state in West Nigritia, and carried on a flourishing trade, especially in slaves and gold. But this gold was still supposed to come from the earlier kingdom of Guine, which word consequently still remains associated with the precious metal in the popular belief. About the year 1500 Mali was captured by the Songhai king, Omar Askia, after which the empire fell to pieces, and its memory now survives only in the ethnical term Mali'nke.

Felups. From the semi-civilised Muhammadan negroid Mandingans to the utterly savage full-blood Negro Felups the transition is abrupt, but instructive. In other regions the heterogeneous ethnical groups crowded into upland valleys, as in the Caucasus, have been called the "sweepings of the plains." But in West Sudan there are no great ranges towering above the lowlands, and even the "Kong Mountains" of school geographies have now been wiped out by L. G. Binger[147]. Hence the rude aborigines of the inland plateau, retreating before the steady advance of Islam, found no place of refuge till they reached the indented fjord-like Atlantic seaboard, where many still hold their ground. This is the explanation of the striking contrasts now witnessed between the interior and so many parts of the West Coast; on the one hand powerful political organisations with numerous, more or less homogeneous, and semi-civilised negroid populations, on the other an infinite tangle of ethnical and linguistic groups, all alike weltering in the sheerest savagery, or in grades of barbarism even worse than the wild state.

Even the Felups, whose territory now stretches from the Gambia to the Cacheo, but formerly reached the Geba and the Bissagos Islands, do not form a single group. Originally the name of an obscure coast-tribe, the term Felup or Fulup has been extended by the Portuguese traders to all the surrounding peoples--Ayamats, Jolas, Jigushes, Vacas, Joats, Karons, Banyuns, Banjars, Fuluns, Bayots and some others who amid much local diversity, presented a sufficiently general outward resemblance to be regarded as a single people by the first European settlers. The Felups proper display the physical and mental characters of the typical Negro even in an exaggerated form--black colour, flat nose, wide nostrils, very thick and everted lips, red on the inner surface, stout muscular frame, correlated with coarse animal passions, crass ignorance, no arts, industry, or even tribal organisation, so that every little family group is independent and mostly in a state of constant feud with its neighbours. All go naked, armed with bow and arrow, and live in log huts which, though strongly built, are indescribably filthy[148].

Mother-right frequently prevails, rank and property being transmitted in the female line. There is some notion of a superhuman being vaguely identified with the sky, the rain, wind or thunderstorm. But all live in extreme terror of the medicine-man, who is openly courted, but inwardly detested, so that whenever it can be safely done the tables are turned, the witch-doctor is seized and tortured to death.

Timni, Kru, Sierra-Leonese, Liberians. Somewhat similar conditions prevail all along the seaboard from Sierra Leone to, and beyond, Cape Palmas, disturbed or modified by the Liberian intruders from the North American plantations, and by the slaves rescued in the thirties and forties by the British cruisers and brought to Sierra Leone, where their descendants now live in settled communities under European influences. These "coloured" citizens of Sierra Leone and Liberia, who are so often the butt of cheap ridicule, and are themselves perhaps too apt to scorn the kindred "niggers" of the bush, have to be carefully distinguished from these true aborigines who have never been wrenched from their natural environment.

In Sierra Leone the chief aboriginal groups on the coastlands are the Timni of the Rokelle river, flanked north and south by two branches of the Bulams, and still further south the Gallinas, Veys and Golas; in the interior the Lokkos, Limbas, Konos, and Kussas, with Kurankos, Mendis, Hubus, and other Mandingans and Fulahs everywhere in the Hinterland.

Of all these the most powerful during the British occupation have always been the Timni (Timani, Temne), who sold to the English the peninsula on which now stands Freetown, but afterwards crying off the bargain, repeatedly tried to drive the white and coloured intruders into the sea. They are a robust people of softened Negro type, and more industrious farmers than most of the other natives. Like the Wolofs they believe in the virtue both of Christian and Moslem amulets, but have hitherto lent a deaf ear to the preachers of both these religions. Nevertheless the Protestant missionaries have carefully studied the Timni language, which possesses an oral literature rich in legends, proverbs, and folklore[149].

The Timni district is a chief centre of the so-called porro fraternity[150], a sort of secret society or freemasonry widely diffused throughout the coastlands, and possessing its own symbols, skin markings, passwords, and language. It presents curious points of analogy with the brotherhoods of the Micronesian islanders, but appears to be even more potent for good and evil, a veritable religious and political state within the state. "When their mandates are issued all wars and civil strife must cease, a general truce is established, and bloodshed stopped, offending communities being punished by bands of armed men in masks. Strangers cannot enter the country unless escorted by a member of the guild, who is recognised by passwords, symbolic gestures, and the like. Their secret rites are celebrated at night in the depths of the forest, all intruders being put to death or sold as slaves[151]."

In studying the social conditions prevalent amongst the Sierra Leonese proper, it should be remembered that they are sprung, not only from representatives of almost every tribe along the seaboard, and even in the far interior, but also to a large extent from the freedmen and runaways of Nova Scotia and London, besides many maroons of Jamaica, who were settled here under the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company towards the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. Others also have in recent years been attracted to the settlements from the Timni and other tribes of the neighbouring districts. The Sierra Leonese are consequently not themselves a tribe, nor yet a people, but rather a people in course of formation under the influence of a new environment and of a higher culture. An immediate consequence of such a sudden aggregation of discordant elements was the loss of all the native tongues, and the substitution of English as the common medium of intercourse. But English is the language of a people standing on the very highest plane of culture, and could not therefore be properly assimilated by the disjecta membra of tribes at the lowest rung of the social ladder. The resultant form of speech may be called ludicrous, so ludicrous that the Sierra Leonese version of the New Testament had to be withdrawn from circulation as verging almost on the blasphemous[152].

It has also to be considered that all the old tribal relations were broken up, while an attempt was made to merge these waifs and strays in a single community based on social conditions to which each and all were utter strangers. It is not therefore surprising that the experiment has not proved a complete success, and that the social relations in Sierra Leone leave something to be desired. Although the freedmen and the rescued captives received free gifts of land, their dislike for the labours of the field induced many to abandon their holdings, and take to huckstering and other more pleasant pursuits. Hence their descendants almost monopolise the petty traffic and even the "professions" in Freetown and the other colonial settlements. Although accused of laziness and dishonesty, they have displayed a considerable degree of industrial as well as commercial enterprise, and the Sierra Leone craftsmen--smiths, mechanics, carpenters, builders--enjoy a good reputation in all the coast towns. All are Christians of various denominations, and even show a marked predilection for the "ministry." Yet below the surface the old paganism still slumbers, and vodoo practices, as in the West Indies and some of the Southern States, are still heard of.

Morality also is admittedly at a low ebb, and it is curious to note that this has in part been attributed to the freedom enjoyed under the British administration. "They have passed from the sphere of native law to that of British law, which is brought to this young community like an article of ready-made clothing. Is it a wonder that the clothes do not fit? Is it a wonder that kings and chiefs around Sierra Leone, instead of wishing their people to come and see how well we do things, dread for them to come to this colony on account of the danger to their morals? In passing into this colony, they pass into a liberty which to them is license[153]."

An experiment of a somewhat different order, but with much the same negative results, has been tried by the well-meaning founders of the Republic of Liberia. Here also the bulk of the "civilised aristocrats" are descended of emancipated plantation slaves, a first consignment of whom was brought over by a philanthropic American society in 1820-22. The idea was to start them well in life under the fostering care of their white guardians, and then leave them to work out their own redemption in their own way. All control was accordingly withdrawn in 1848, and since then the settlement has constituted an absolutely independent Negro state in the enjoyment of complete self-government. Progress of a certain material kind was undoubtedly made. The original "free citizens" increased from 8000 in 1850 to perhaps 20,000 in 1898[154], and the central administration, modelled on that of the United States, maintained some degree of order among the surrounding aborigines, estimated at some two million within the limits of the Republic.

But these aborigines have not benefited perceptibly by contact with their "civilised" neighbours, who themselves stand at much the same level intellectually and morally as their repatriated forefathers. Instead of attending to the proper administration of the Republic, the "Weegee," as they are called, have constituted themselves into two factions, the "coloured" or half-breeds, and the full-blood Negroes who, like the "Blancos" and "Neros" of some South American States, spend most of their time in a perpetual struggle for office. All are of course intensely patriotic, but their patriotism takes a wrong direction, being chiefly manifested in their insolence towards the English and other European traders on the coast, and in their supreme contempt for the "stinking bush-niggers," as they call the surrounding aborigines. In 1909 internal and external difficulties led to the appointment of a Commission by President Roosevelt with the result that the American Government took charge of the finances, military organisation, agriculture and boundary questions, besides arranging for a loan of L400,000. The able administration of President Barclay, a pure blooded Negro, though not of Liberian ancestry, is perhaps the happiest augury for the future of the Republic[155].

The Krus (Kroomen, Krooboys[156]), whose numerous hamlets are scattered along the coast from below Monrovia nearly to Cape Palmas, are assuredly one of the most interesting people in the whole of Africa. Originally from the interior, they have developed in their new homes a most un-African love of the sea, hence are regularly engaged as crews by the European skippers plying along those insalubrious coastlands.

In this service, in which they are known by such nicknames as "Bottle-of-Beer," "Mashed-Potatoes," "Bubble-and-Squeak," "Pipe-of-Tobacco," and the like, their word may always be depended upon. But it is to be feared that this loyalty, which with them is a strict matter of business, has earned for them a reputation for other virtues to which they have little claim. Despite the many years that they have been in the closest contact with the missionaries and traders, they are still at heart the same brutal savages as ever. After each voyage they return to the native village to spend all their gains and pilferings in drunken orgies, and relapse generally into sheer barbarism till the next steamer rounds the neighbouring headland. "It is not a comfortable reflection," writes Bishop Ingham, whose testimony will not be suspected of bias, "as we look at this mob on our decks, that, if the ship chance to strike on a sunken rock and become unmanageable, they would rise to a man, and seize all they could lay hands on, cut the very rings off our fingers if they could get them in no other way, and generally loot the ship. Little has been done to Christianise these interesting, hard-working, cheerful, but ignorant and greedy people, who have so long hung on the skirts of civilisation[157]."

It is only fair to the Kru to say that this unflattering picture of them stands alone. "There is but one man of all of us who have visited West Africa who has not paid a tribute to the Kruboy's sterling qualities," says Miss Kingsley. Her opinion coincides with that of the old coasters based on life-long experience, and she waxes indignant at the ingratitude with which Kruboy loyalty is rewarded. "They have devoted themselves to us English, and they have suffered, laboured, fought, been massacred and so on with us generation after generation.... Kruboys are, indeed, the backbone of white effort in West Africa[158]."

But the very worst "sweepings of the Sudanese plateau" seem to have gathered along the Upper Guinea Coast, occupied by the already mentioned Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba groups[159]. They constitute three branches of one linguistic, and probably also of one ethnical family, of which, owing to their historic and ethnical importance, the reader may be glad to have here subjoined a somewhat complete tabulated scheme.

The Ga of the Volta delta are here bracketed with the Tshi because A. B. Ellis, our great authority on the Guinea peoples[160], considers the two languages to be distantly connected. He also thinks there is a foundation of fact in the native traditions, which bring the dominant tribes--Ashanti, Fanti, Dahomi, Yoruba, Bini--from the interior to the coast districts at no very remote period. Thus it is recorded of the Ashanti and Fanti, now hereditary foes, that ages ago they formed one people who were reduced to the utmost distress during a long war with some inland power, perhaps the conquering Muhammadans of the Ghana or Mali empire. They were saved, however, some by eating of the shan, others of the fan plant, and of these words, with the verb di, "to eat," were made the tribal names Shan-di, Fan-di, now Ashanti, Fanti. The seppiriba plant, said to have been eaten by the Fanti, is still called fan when cooked.

TRIBES OF TSHI TRIBES OF EWE TRIBES OF YORUBA AND GA SPEECH SPEECH SPEECH

Gold Coast Slave Coast West Slave Coast East and Niger Delta

Ashanti Dahomi Yoruba[161] Safwhi Eweawo Ibadan Denkera Agotine Ketu Bekwai Anfueh Egba Nkoranza Krepe Jebu Adansi Avenor Remo Assin Awuna Ode Wassaw Agbosomi Ilorin Ahanta Aflao Ijesa Fanti Ataklu Ondo Agona Krikor Mahin Akwapim Geng Benin (Bini) Akim Attakpami Kakanda Akwamu Aja Wari Kwao Ewemi Ibo[161] Ga Appa Efik[161]

Other traditions refer to a time when all were of one speech, and lived in a far country beyond Salagha, open, flat, with little bush, and plenty of cattle and sheep, a tolerably accurate description of the inland Sudanese plateaux. But then came a red people, said to be the Fulahs, Muhammadans, who oppressed the blacks and drove them to take refuge in the forests. Here they thrived and multiplied, and after many vicissitudes they came down, down, until at last they reached the coast, with the waves rolling in, the white foam hissing and frothing on the beach, and thought it was all boiling water until some one touched it and found it was not hot, and so to this day they call the sea Eh-huru den o nni shew, "Boiling water not hot," but far inland the sea is still "Boiling water[162]."

To A. B. Ellis we are indebted especially for the true explanation of the much used and abused term fetish, as applied to the native beliefs. It was of course already known to be not an African but a Portuguese word[163], meaning a charm, amulet, or even witchcraft. But Ellis shows how it came to be wrongly applied to all forms of animal and nature worship, and how the confusion was increased by De Brosses' theory of a primordial fetishism, and by his statement that it was impossible to conceive a lower form of religion than fetishism, which might therefore be assumed to be the beginning of all religion[164].

On the contrary it represents rather an advanced stage, as Ellis discovered after four or five years of careful observation on the spot. A fetish, he tells us, is something tangible and inanimate, which is believed to possess power in itself, and is worshipped for itself alone. Nor can such an object be picked up anywhere at random, as is commonly asserted, and he adds that the belief "is arrived at only after considerable progress has been made in religious ideas, when the older form of religion becomes secondary and owes its existence to the confusion of the tangible with the intangible, of the material with the immaterial; to the belief in the indwelling god being gradually lost sight of until the power originally believed to belong to the god, is finally attributed to the tangible and inanimate object itself."

But now comes a statement that may seem paradoxical to most students of the evolution of religious ideas. We are assured that fetishism thus understood is not specially or at all characteristic of the religion of the Gold Coast natives, who are in fact "remarkably free from it" and believe in invisible intangible deities. Some of them may dwell in a tangible inanimate object, popularly called a "fetish"; but the idea of the indwelling god is never lost sight of, nor is the object ever worshipped for its own sake. True fetishism, the worship of such material objects and images, prevails, on the contrary, far more "amongst the Negroes of the West Indies, who have been christianised for more than half-a-century, than amongst those of West Africa. Hence the belief in Obeah, still prevalent in the West Indies, which formerly was a belief in indwelling spirits which inhabited certain objects, has now become a worship paid to tangible and inanimate objects, which of themselves are believed to possess the power to injure. In Europe itself we find evidence amongst the Roman Catholic populations of the South, that fetishism is a corruption of a former culte, rather than a primordial faith. The lower classes there have confused the intangible with the tangible, and believe that the images of the saints can both see, hear and feel. Thus we find the Italian peasants and fishermen beat and ill-treat their images when their requests have not been complied with.... These appear to be instances of true fetishism[165]."

Another phase of religious belief in Upper Guinea is ancestry worship, which has here been developed to a degree unknown elsewhere. As the departed have to be maintained in the same social position beyond the grave that they enjoyed in this world, they must be supplied with slaves, wives, and attendants, each according to his rank. Hence the institution of the so-called "customs," or anniversary feasts of the dead, accompanied by the sacrifice of human victims, regulated at first by the status and afterwards by the whim and caprice of chiefs and kings. In the capitals of the more powerful states, Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, the scenes witnessed at these sanguinary rites rivalled in horror those held in honour of the Aztec gods. Details may here be dispensed with on a repulsive subject, ample accounts of which are accessible from many sources to the general reader. In any case these atrocities teach no lesson, except that most religions have waded through blood to better things, unless arrested in mid-stream by the intervention of higher powers, as happily in Upper Guinea, where the human shambles of Kumassi, Abomeh, Benin and most other places have now been swept away.

On the capture of Benin by the English in 1897 a rare and unexpected prize fell into the hands of ethnologists. Here was found a large assortment of carved ivories, woodwork, and especially a series of about 300 bronze and brass plates or panels with figures of natives and Europeans, armed and in armour, in full relief, all cast by the cire perdue process[166], some barbaric, others, and especially a head in the round of a young negress, showing high artistic skill. Many of these remarkable objects are in the British Museum, where they have been studied by C. H. Read and O. M. Dalton[167], who are evidently right in assigning the better class to the sixteenth century, and to the aid, if not the hand, of some Portuguese artificers in the service of the King of Benin. They add that "casting of an inferior kind continues down to the present time," and it may here be mentioned that armour has long been and is still worn by the cavalry, and even their horses, in the Muhammadan states of Central Sudan. "The chiefs (Kashellawa) who serve as officers under the Sultan [of Bornu] and act as his bodyguard wear jackets of chain armour and cuirasses of coats of mail[168]." It is clear that metal casting in a large way has long been practised by the semi-civilised peoples of Sudan.

Within the great bend of the Niger the veil, first slightly raised by Barth in the middle of the nineteenth century, has now been drawn aside by L. G. Binger, F. D. Lugard and later explorers. Here the Mossi, Borgu and others have hitherto more or less successfully resisted the Moslem advance, and are consequently for the most part little removed from the savage state. Even the "Faithful" wear the cloak of Islam somewhat loosely, and the level of their culture may be judged from the case of the Imam of Diulasu, who pestered Binger for nostrums and charms against ailments, war, and misfortunes. What he wanted chiefly to know was the names of Abraham's two wives. "Tell me these," he would say, "and my fortune is made, for I dreamt it the other night; you must tell me; I really must have those names or I'm lost[169]."

In some districts the ethnical confusion is considerable, and when Binger arrived at the Court of the Mossi King, Baikary, he was addressed successively in Mossi, Hausa, Songhai, and Fulah, until at last it was discovered that Mandingan was the only native language he understood. Waghadugu, capital of the chief Mossi state, comprises several distinct quarters occupied respectively by Mandingans, Marengas (Songhai), Zang-wer'os (Hausas), Chilmigos (Fulahs), Mussulman and heathen Mossis, the whole population scarcely exceeding 5000. However, perfect harmony prevails, the Mossi themselves being extremely tolerant despite the long religious wars they have had to wage against the fanatical Fulahs and other Muhammadan aggressors[170].

Religious indifference is indeed a marked characteristic of this people, and the case is mentioned of a nominal Mussulman prince who could even read and write, and say his prayers, but whose two sons "knew nothing at all," or, as we should say, were "Agnostics." One of them, however, it is fair to add, is claimed by both sides, the Moslems asserting that he says his prayers in secret, the heathens that he drinks dolo (palm-wine), which of course no true believer is supposed ever to do.

CENTRAL SUDANESE.

In Central Sudan, that is, the region stretching from the Niger to Wadai, a tolerably clean sweep has been made of the aborigines, except along the southern fringe and in parts of the Chad basin. For many centuries Islam has here been firmly established, and in Negroland Islam is synonymous with a greater or less degree of miscegenation. The native tribes who resisted the fiery Arab or Tuareg or Tibu proselytisers were for the most part either extirpated, or else driven to the southern uplands about the Congo-Chad water-parting. All who accepted the Koran became merged with the conquerors in a common negroid population, which supplied the new material for the development of large social communities and powerful political states.

Under these conditions the old tribal organisations were in great measure dissolved, and throughout its historic period of about a millennium Central Sudan is found mainly occupied by peoples gathered together in a small number of political systems, each with its own language and special institutions, but all alike accepting Islam as the State religion. Such are or were the Songhai empire, the Hausa States, and the kingdoms of Bornu with Kanem and Baghirmi, and these jointly cover the whole of Central Sudan as above defined.

Songhais[171]. How completely the tribe[172] has merged in the people[172] may be inferred from the mere statement that, although no longer an independent nation[172], the negroid Songhais form a single ethnical group of about two million souls, all of one speech and one religion, and all distinguished by somewhat uniform physical and mental characters. This territory lies mainly about the borderlands between Sudan and the Sahara, stretching from Timbuktu east to the Asben oasis and along both banks of the Niger from Lake Debo round to the Sokoto confluence, and also at some points reaching as far as the Hombori hills within the great bend of the Niger.

Here they are found in the closest connection with the Ireghenaten ("mixed") Tuaregs, and elsewhere with other Tuaregs, and with Arabs, Fulahs or Hausas[173], so that exclusively Songhai communities are now somewhat rare. But the bulk of the race is still concentrated in Gurma and in the district between Gobo and Timbuktu, the two chief cities of the old Songhai empire.

They are a distinctly negroid people, presenting various shades of intermixture with the surrounding Hamites and Semites, but generally of a very deep brown or blackish colour, with somewhat regular features and that peculiar long, black, and ringletty hair, which is so characteristic of Negro and Caucasic blends, as seen amongst the Trarsas and Braknas of the Senegal, the Bejas, Danakils, and many Abyssinians of the region between the Nile and the Red Sea. Barth, to whom we still owe the best account of this historical people, describes them as of a dull, morose temperament, the most unfriendly and churlish of all the peoples visited by him in Negroland.

This writer's suggestion that they may have formerly had relations with the Egyptians[174] has been revived in an exaggerated form by M. Felix Dubois, whose views have received currency in England through uncritical notices of his Timbouctou la Mysterieuse (Paris, 1897). But there is no "mystery" in the matter. The Songhai are a Sudanese people, whose exodus from Egypt is a myth, and whose Kissur language, as it is called, has not the remotest connection with any form of speech known to have been at any time current in the Nile Valley[175]. Nor has it any evident affinities with any group of African tongues. H. H. Johnston regards the Songhai as the result of the mixing of "the Libyan section of the Hamitic peoples, reinforced by Berbers (Iberians) from Spain," with the pre-existing Fulah type and the Negroids; as also from the far earlier intercourse between the Fulah and the Negro[176].

The Songhai empire, like that of the rival Mandingans, claims a respectable antiquity, its reputed founder Za-el-Yemeni having flourished about 680 A.D. Za Kasi, fifteenth in succession from the founder, was the first Muhammadan ruler (1009); but about 1326 the country was reduced by the Mandingans, and remained throughout the fourteenth and a great part of the fifteenth century virtually subject to the Mali empire, although Ali Killun, founder of the new Sonni dynasty, had acquired a measure of independence about 1335-6. But the political supremacy of the Songhai people dates only from about 1464, when Sonni Ali, sixteenth of the Sonni dynasty, known in history as "the great tyrant and famous miscreant," threw off the Mandingan yoke, "and changed the whole face of this part of Africa by prostrating the kingdom of Melle[177]." Under his successor, Muhammad Askia[178], "perhaps the greatest sovereign that ever ruled over Negroland[179]," the Songhai Empire acquired its greatest expansion, extending from the heart of Hausaland to the Atlantic seaboard, and from the Mossi country to the Tuat oasis, south of Morocco. Although unfavourably spoken of by Leo Africanus, Askia is described by Ahmed Baba as governing the subject peoples "with justice and equity, causing well-being and comfort to spring up everywhere within the borders of his extensive dominions, and introducing such of the institutions of Muhammadan civilisation as he considered might be useful to his subjects[180]."

Askia also made the Mecca pilgrimage with a great show of splendour. But after his reign (1492-1529) the Songhai power gradually declined, and was at last overthrown by Mulay Hamed, Emperor of Morocco, in 1591-2. Ahmed Baba, the native chronicler, was involved in the ruin of his people[181], and since then the Songhai nation has been broken into fragments, subject here to Hausas, there to Fulahs, elsewhere to Tuaregs, and, since the French occupation of Timbuktu (1894), to the hated Giaur.

Hausas. In everything that constitutes the real greatness of a nation, the Hausas may rightly claim preeminence amongst all the peoples of Negroland. No doubt early in the nineteenth century the historical Hausa States, occupying the whole region between the Niger and Bornu, were overrun and reduced by the fanatical Fulah bands under Othman Dan Fodye. But the Hausas, in a truer sense than the Greeks, "have captured their rude conquerors[182]," for they have even largely assimilated them physically to their own type, and the Hausa nationality is under British auspices asserting its natural social, industrial and commercial predominance throughout Central and even parts of Western Sudan.

It could not well be otherwise, seeing that the Hausas form a compact body of some five million peaceful and industrious Sudanese, living partly in numerous farmsteads amid their well-tilled cotton, indigo, pulse, and corn fields, partly in large walled cities and great trading centres such as Kano[183], Katsena, Yacoba, whose intelligent and law-abiding inhabitants are reckoned by many tens of thousands. Their melodious tongue, with a vocabulary containing perhaps 10,000 words[184], has long been the great medium of intercourse throughout Sudan from Lake Chad to and beyond the Niger, and is daily acquiring even greater preponderance amongst all the settled and trading populations of these regions.

But though showing a marked preference for peaceful pursuits, the Hausas are by no means an effeminate people. Largely enlisted in the British service, they have at all times shown fighting qualities of a high order under their English officers, and a well-earned tribute has been paid to their military prowess amongst others by Sir George Goldie and Lieut. Vandeleur[185]. With the Hausas on her side England need assuredly fear no rivals to her beneficent sway over the teeming populations of the fertile plains and plateaux of Central Sudan, which is on the whole perhaps the most favoured land in Africa north of the equator.

According to the national traditions, which go back to no very remote period[186], the seven historical Hausa States known as the "Hausa bokoy" ("the seven Hausas") take their name from the eponymous heroes Biram, Daura, Gober, Kano, Rano, Katsena and Zegzeg, all said to be sprung from the Deggaras, a Berber tribe settled to the north of Munyo. From Biram, the original seat, the race and its language spread to seven other provinces--Zanfara, Kebbi, Nupe (Nyffi), Gwari, Yauri, Yariba and Kororofa, which in contempt are called the "Banza bokoy" ("the seven Upstarts"). All form collectively the Hausa domain in the widest sense.

Authentic history is quite recent, and even Komayo, reputed founder of Katsena, dates only from about the fourteenth century. Ibrahim Maji, who was the first Moslem ruler, is assigned to the latter part of the fifteenth century, and since then the chief events have been associated with the Fulah wars, ending in the absorption of all the Hausa States in the unstable Fulah empire of Sokoto at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With the fall of Kano and Sokoto in 1903 British supremacy was finally established throughout the Hausa States, now termed Northern Nigeria[187].

Kanembu; Kanuri[188]; Baghirmi, Mosgu. Round about the shores of Lake Chad are grouped three other historical Muhammadan nations, the Kanembu ("People of Kanem") on the north, the Kanuri of Bornu on the west, and the Baghirmi on the south side. The last named was conquered by the Sultan of Wadai in 1871, and overrun by Rabah Zobeir, half Arab, half Negro adventurer, in 1890. But in 1897 Emile Gentil[189], French commissioner for the district, placed the country under French protection, although French authority was not firmly established until the death of Rabah and the rout of his sons in 1901. At the same time Kanem was brought under French control, and shortly afterwards Bornu was divided between Great Britain, France and Germany.

In this region the ethnical relations are considerably more complex than in the Hausa States. Here Islam has had greater obstacles to contend with than on the more open western plateaux, and many of the pagan aborigines have been able to hold their ground either in the archipelagos of Lake Chad (Yedinas, Kuri, Buduma[190]), or in the swampy tracts and uplands of the Logon-Shari basin (Mosgu, Mandara, Makari, etc.).

It was also the policy of the Muhammadans, whose system is based on slavery, not to push their religious zeal too far, for, if all the natives were converted, where could they procure a constant supply of slaves, those who accept the teachings of the Prophet being ipso facto entitled to their freedom? Hence the pagan districts were, and still are, regarded as convenient preserves, happy hunting-grounds to be raided from time to time, but not utterly wasted; to be visited by organised razzias just often enough to keep up the supply in the home and foreign markets. This system, controlled by the local governments themselves, has long prevailed about the borderlands between Islam and heathendom, as we know from Barth, Nachtigal, and one or two other travellers, who have had reluctantly to accompany the periodical slave-hunting expeditions from Bornu and Baghirmi to the territories of the pagan Mosgu people with their numerous branches (Margi, Mandara, Makari, Logon, Gamergu, Keribina) and the other aborigines (Bede, Ngisem, So, Kerrikerri, Babir) on the northern slopes of the Congo-Chad water-parting. As usual on such occasions, there is a great waste of life, many perishing in defence of their homes or even through sheer wantonness, besides those carried away captives. "A large number of slaves had been caught this day," writes Barth, "and in the evening a great many more were brought in; altogether they were said to have taken one thousand, and there were certainly not less than five hundred. To our utmost horror, not less than 170 full-grown men were mercilessly slaughtered in cold blood, the greater part of them being allowed to bleed to death, a leg having been severed from the body[191]." There was probably just then a glut in the market.

A curious result of these relations is that in the wooded districts some of the natives have reverted to arboreal habits, taking refuge during the raids in the branches of huge bombax-trees converted into temporary strongholds. Round the vertical stem of these forest giants is erected a breast-high look-out, while the higher horizontal branches, less exposed to the fire of the enemy, support strongly-built huts and store-houses, where the families of the fugitives take refuge with their effects, including, as Nachtigal assures us[192], their domestic animals, such as goats, dogs, and poultry. During the siege of the aerial fortress, which is often successfully defended, long light ladders of withies are let down at night, when no attack need be feared, and the supply of water and provisions is thus renewed from caches or hiding-places round about. In 1872 Nachtigal accompanied a predatory excursion to the pagan districts south of Baghirmi, when an attack was made on one of these tree-fortresses. Such citadels can be stormed only at a heavy loss, and as the Gaberi (Baghirmi) warriors had no tools capable of felling the great bombax-tree, they were fain to rest satisfied with picking off a poor wretch now and then, and barbarously mutilating the bodies as they fell from the overhanging branches.

Some of these aborigines disfigure their faces by the disk-like lip-ornament, which is also fashionable in Nyassaland, and even amongst the South American Botocudos. The type often differs greatly, and while some of the widespread Mosgu tribes are of a dirty black hue, with disagreeable expression, wide open nostrils, thick lips, high cheek-bones, coarse bushy hair, and disproportionate knock-kneed legs, other members of the same family astonished Barth "by the beauty and symmetry of their forms, and by the regularity of their features, which in some had nothing of what is called the Negro type. But I was still more astonished at their complexion, which was very different in different individuals, being in some of a glossy black, and in others of a light copper, or rather rhubarb colour, the intermediate shades being almost entirely wanting. I observed in one house a really beautiful female who, with her son, about eight or nine years of age, formed a most charming group, well worthy of the hand of an accomplished artist. The boy's form did not yield in any respect to the beautiful symmetry of the most celebrated Grecian statues. His hair, indeed, was very short and curled, but not woolly. He, as well as his mother and the whole family, were of a pale or yellowish-red complexion, like rhubarb[193]."

There is no suggestion of albinism, and the explanation of such strange contrasts must await further exploration in the whole of this borderland of Negroes and Bantus about the divide between the Chad and the Congo basins. The country has until lately been traversed only at rare intervals by pioneers, interested more in political than in anthropological matters.

Of the settled and more or less cultured peoples in the Chad basin, the most important are the Kanembu[194], who introduce a fresh element of confusion in this region, being more allied in type and speech to the Hamitic Tibus than to the Negro stock, or at least taking a transitional position between the two; the Kanuri, the ruling people in Bornu, of somewhat coarse Negroid appearance[195]; and the southern Baghirmi, also decidedly Negroid, originally supposed to have come from the Upper Shari and White Nile districts[196]. Their civilisation, such as it is, has been developed exclusively under Moslem influences, but it has never penetrated much below the surface. The people are everywhere extremely rude, and for the most part unlettered, although the meagre and not altogether trustworthy Kanem-Bornu records date from the time of Sef, reputed founder of the monarchy about 800 A.D. Duku, second in descent from Sef, is doubtfully referred to about 850 A.D. Hame, founder of a new dynasty, flourished towards the end of the eleventh century (1086-97), and Dunama, one of his successors, is said to have extended his sway over a great part of the Sahara, including the whole of Fezzan (1221-59). Under Omar (1394-98) a divorce took place between Kanem and Bornu, and henceforth the latter country has remained the chief centre of political power in the Chad basin.

A long series of civil wars was closed by Ali (1472-1504), who founded the present capital, Birni, and whose grandson, Muhammad, brought the empire of Bornu to the highest pitch of its greatness (1526-45). Under Ahmed (1793-1810) began the wars with the Fulahs, who, after bringing the empire to the verge of ruin, were at last overthrown by the aid of the Kanem people, and since 1819 Bornu has been ruled by the present Kanemiyin dynasty, which though temporarily conquered by Rabah in 1893, was restored under British administration in 1902[197].

EASTERN SUDANESE.

As some confusion prevails regarding the expression "Eastern Sudan," I may here explain that it bears a very different meaning, according as it is used in a political or an ethnical sense. Politically it is practically synonymous with Egyptian Sudan, that is the whole region from Darfur to the Red Sea which was ruled or misruled by the Khedivial Government before the revolt of the Mahdi (1883-4), and was restored to Egypt by the British occupation of Khartum in 1898. Ethnically Eastern Sudan comprises all the lands east of the Chad basin, where the Negro or Negroid populations are predominant, that is to say, Wadai, Darfur, and Kordofan in the West, the Nile Valley from the frontier of Egypt proper south to Albert Nyanza, both slopes of the Nile-Congo divide (the western tributaries of the White Nile and the Welle-Makua affluent of the Congo), lastly the Sobat Valley with some Negro enclaves east of the White Nile, and even south of the equator (Kavirondo, Semliki Valley).

Throughout this region the fusion of the aborigines with Hamites and Arabs, Tuareg, or Tibu Moslem intruders, wherever they have penetrated, has been far less complete than in Central and Western Sudan. Thus in Wadai the dominant Maba people, whence the country is often called Dar-Maba ("Mabaland"), are rather Negro than Negroid, with but a slight strain of foreign blood. In the northern districts the Zoghawa, Gura'an, Baele and Bulala Tibus keep quite aloof from the blacks, as do elsewhere; the Aramkas, as the Arabs are collectively called in Wadai. Yet the Mahamid and some other Bedouin tribes have here been settled for over 500 years, and it was through their assistance that the Mabas acquired the political supremacy they have enjoyed since the seventeenth century, when they reduced or expelled the Tynjurs[198], the former ruling race, said to be Nubians originally from Dongola. It was Abd-el-Kerim, founder of the new Moslem Maba state, who gave the country its present name in honour of his grandfather, Wadai. His successor Kharub I removed the seat of government to Wara, where Vogel was murdered in 1856. Abeshr, the present capital, dates only from the year 1850. Except for Nachtigal, who crossed the frontier in 1873, nothing was known of the land or its people until the French occupation at the end of the last century (1899). Since that date it has been prominent as the scene of the attack on a French column and the death of its leader, Colonel Moll, in 1910, and the tragic murder of Lieutenant Boyd Alexander earlier in the same year[199].

Nubas. As in Wadai, the intruding and native populations have been either imperfectly or not at all assimilated in Darfur and Kordofan, where the Muhammadan Semites still boast of their pure Arab descent[200], and form powerful confederacies. Chief among these are the Baggara (Baqqara, "cow-herds"), cattle-keepers and agriculturalists, of whom some are as dark as the blackest negroes, though many are fine-looking, with regular, well-shaped features. Their form of Arabic is notoriously corrupt. Their rivals, the Jaalan (Jalin, Jahalin), are mostly riverain "Arabs," a learned tribe, containing many scribes, and their language is said to be closer to classical Arabic than the form current in Egypt. These are the principal slave-hunters of the Sudan, and the famous Zobeir belonged to their tribe. The Yemanieh are largely traders, and trace their origin from South Arabia. The Kababish are the wealthiest camel-owning tribe, perhaps less contaminated by negro blood than any other Arab tribe in the Sudan[201]. The Nuba and the Nubians have been a source of much confusion, but recent investigations in the field such as those of C. G. Seligman[202] and H. A. MacMichael[203], and the publications of the Archaeological Survey of Nubia conducted by G. A. Reisner, help to elucidate the problem. We have first of all to get rid of the "Nuba-Fulah" family, which was introduced by Fr. Mueller and accepted by some English writers, but has absolutely no existence. The two languages, although both of the agglutinative Sudanese type, are radically distinct in all their structural, lexical, and phonetic elements, and the two peoples are equally distinct. The Fulahs are of North African origin, although many have in recent times been largely assimilated to their black Sudanese subjects. The Nuba on the contrary belong originally to the Negro stock, with hair of the common negro type, and are among the darkest skinned tribes in the Sudan, their colour varying from a dark chocolate brown to the darkest shade of brown black.

But rightly to understand the question we have carefully to avoid confusion between the Nubians of the Nile Valley and the Negro Nubas, who gave their name to the Nuba Mountains, Kordofan, where most of the aborigines (Kargo, Kulfan, Kolaji, Tumali, Lafofa, Eliri, Talodi) still belong to this connection[203]. Kordofan is probably itself a Nuba word meaning "Land of the Kordo" (fan = Arab, dar, land, country). There is a certain amount of anthropological evidence to connect the Nuba with the Fur and the Kara of Darfur to the west[204]. But it is a different anthropological type that is represented in the three groups of Matokki (Kenus) between the First Cataract and Wadi-el-Arab, the Mahai (Marisi) between Korosko and Wadi-Halfa, at the Second Cataract, and the Dongolawi, of the province of Dongola between Wadi-Halfa and Jebel Deja near Meroe.

These three groups, all now Muhammadans, but formerly Christians, constitute collectively the so-called "Nubians" of European writers, but call themselves Barabra, Plural of Berberi, i.e. people of Berber, although they do not at present extend so far up the Nile as that town[205]. Possibly these are Strabo's "Noubai, who dwell on the left bank of the Nile in Libya [Africa], a great nation etc.[206]"; and are also to be identified with the Nobatae, who in Diocletian's time were settled, some in the Kharga oasis, others in the Nile Valley about Meroe, to guard the frontiers of the empire against the incursions of the restless Blemmues. But after some time they appear to have entered into peaceful relations with these Hamites, the present Bejas, even making common cause with them against the Romans; but the confederacy was crushed by Maximinus in 451, though perhaps not before crossings had taken place between the Nobatae and the Caucasic Bejas. Then these Bejas withdrew to their old homes, which they still occupy, between the Nile and the Red Sea above Egypt, while the Nobatae, embracing Christianity, as is said, in 545, established the powerful kingdom of Dongola which lasted over 800 years, and was finally overthrown by the Arabs in the fourteenth century, since which time the Nile Nubians have been Muhammadans.

There still remains the problem of language which, as shown by Lepsius[207], differs but slightly from that now current amongst the Kordofan Nubas. But this similarity only holds in the north, and is now shown to be due to Berberine immigration into Kordofan[208]. Recent investigations show that the Nuba and the Barabra, in spite of this linguistic similarity which has misled certain authors[209], are not to be regarded as belonging to the same race[210]. "The Nuba are a tall, stoutly built muscular people, with a dark, almost black skin. They are predominantly mesaticephalic, for although cephalic indices under 70 and over 80 both occur, nearly 60 per cent. of the individuals measured are mesaticephals, the remaining being dolichocephalic and brachycephalic in about equal proportions." The hair is invariably woolly. The Barabra, on the contrary, is of slight, or more commonly medium build, not particularly muscular and in skin colour varies from a yellowish to a chocolate brown. The hair is commonly curly or wavy and may be almost straight, while the features are not uncommonly absolutely non-Negroid. "Thus there can be no doubt that the two peoples are essentially different in physical characters and the same holds good on the cultural side" (p. 611). Barabra were identified by Lepsius with the Wawat, a people frequently mentioned in Egyptian records, and recent excavations by the members of the Archaeological Survey of Nubia show a close connection with the predynastic Egyptians, a connection supported also on physical grounds. It seems strange, therefore, to meet with repeated reference on Egyptian monuments to Negroes in Nubia when, as proved by excavations, the inhabitants were by no means Negroes or even frankly Negroid. Seligman's solution of the difficulty is as follows (p. 619). It seems that only one explanation is tenable, namely that for a period subsequent to the Middle Kingdom the country in the neighbourhood of the Second Cataract became essentially a Negro country and may have remained in this condition for some little time. Then a movement in the opposite direction set in; the Negroes, diminished by war, were in part driven back by the great conquerors of the New Empire; those that were left mixed with the Egyptian garrisons and traders and once more a hybrid race arose which, however, preserved the language of its Negro ancestors. Although Seligman regards the conclusion that this race gave rise directly to the present-day inhabitants of Nubia as "premature," and suggests further mixture with the Beja of the eastern deserts, Elliot Smith recognises the essential similarity between the homogeneous blend of Egyptian and Negro traits which characterise the Middle Nubian people (contemporary with the Middle Empire, XII-XVII dynasties), a type which "seems to have remained dominant in Nubia ever since then, for the span of almost 4000 years[211]."

Before the incursions of the Nubian-Arab traders and raiders, who began to form settlements (zeribas, fenced stations) in the Upper Nile regions above Khartum about the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the Nile-Congo divide (White Nile tributaries and Welle-Makua basin) belonged in the strictest sense to the Negro domain. Sudanese tribes, and even great nations reckoned by millions, had been for ages in almost undisturbed possession, not only of the main stream from the equatorial lakes to and beyond the Sobat junction, but also of the Sobat Valley itself, and of the numerous south-western head-waters of the White Nile converging about Lake No above the Sobat junction. Nearly all the Nile peoples--the Shilluks and Dinkas about the Sobat confluence, the Bari and Nuers of the Bahr-el-Jebel, the Bongos (Dors), Rols, Golos, Mittus, Madis, Makarakas, Abakas, Mundus, and many others about the western affluents, as well as the Funj of Senaar--had been brought under the Khedivial rule before the revolt of the Mahdi.

The same fate had already overtaken or was threatening the formerly powerful Mombuttu (Mangbattu) and Zandeh[212] nations of the Welle lands, as well as the Krej and others about the low watersheds of the Nile-Congo and Chad basins. Since then the Welle groups have been subjected to the jurisdiction of the Congo Free State, while the political destinies of the Nilotic tribes must henceforth be controlled by the British masters of the Nile lands from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean.

Although grouped as Negroes proper, very few of the Nilotic peoples present the almost ideal type of the blacks, such as those of Upper Guinea and the Atlantic coast of West Sudan. The complexion is in general less black, the nose less broad at the base, the lips less everted (Shilluks and one or two others excepted), the hair rather less frizzly, the dolichocephaly and prognathism less marked.

Apart from the more delicate shades of transition, due to diverse interminglings with Hamites and Semites, two distinct types may be plainly distinguished--one black, often very tall, with long thin legs, and long-headed (Shilluks, Dinkas, Bari, Nuers, Alur), the other reddish or ruddy brown, more thick-set, and short-headed (Bongos, Golos, Makarakas, with the kindred Zandehs of the Welle region). No explanation has been offered of their brachycephaly, which is all the more difficult to account for, inasmuch as it is characteristic neither of the aboriginal Negro nor of the intruding Hamitic and Semitic elements. Have we here an indication of the transition suspected by many between the true long-headed Negro and the round-headed Negrillo, who is also brownish, and formerly ranged as far north as the Nile head-streams, as would appear from the early Egyptian records (Chap. IV.)? Schweinfurth found that the Bongos were "hardly removed from the lowest grade of brachycephaly[213]," and the same is largely true of the Zandehs and their Makaraka cousins, as noticed by Junker: "The skull also in many of these peoples approaches the round form, whereas the typical Negro is assumed to be long-headed[214]." But so great is the diversity of appearance throughout the whole of this region, including even "a striking Semitic type," that this observer was driven to the conclusion that "woolly hair, common to all, forms in fact the only sure characteristic of the Negro[215]."

Dinka is the name given to a congeries of independent tribes spread over a vast area, stretching from 300 miles south of Khartum to within 100 miles of Gondokoro, and reaching many miles to the west in the Bahr-el-Ghazal Province. All these tribes according to C. G. Seligman[216] call themselves Jieng or Jenge, corrupted by the Arabs into Dinka; but no Dinka nation has arisen, for the tribes have never recognised a supreme chief, as do their neighbours, the Shilluk, nor have they even been united under a military despot, as the Zulu were united under Chaka. They differ in manners and customs and even in physique and are often at war with one another. One of the most obvious distinctions in habits is between the relatively powerful cattle-owning Dinka and the small and comparatively poor tribes who have no cattle and scarcely cultivate the ground, but live in the marshes in the neighbourhood of the Sudd, and depend largely for their sustenance on fishing and hippopotamus-hunting. Their villages, which are generally dirty and evil-smelling, are built on ground which rises but little above the reed-covered surface of the country. The Dinka community is largely autonomous under leadership of a chief or headman (bain) who is sometimes merely the local magician, but in one community in each tribe he is the hereditary rain-maker whose wish is law. "Cattle form the economic basis of Dinka society; ... they are the currency in which bride-price and blood-fines are paid; and the desire to acquire a neighbour's herds is the common cause of those inter-tribal raids which constitute Dinka warfare."

Some uniformity appears to prevail amongst the languages of the Nile-Welle lands, and from the rather scanty materials collected by Junker, Fr. Mueller was able to construct an "Equatorial Linguistic Family," including the Mangbattu, Zandeh, Barmbo, Madi, Bangba, Krej, Golo and others, on both sides of the water-parting. Leo Reinisch, however, was not convinced, and in a letter addressed to the author declared that "in the absence of sentences it is impossible to determine the grammatical structure of Mangbattu and the other languages. At the same time we may detect certain relations, not to the Nilotic, but the Bantu tongues. It may therefore be inferred that Mangbattu and the others have a tolerably close relationship to the Bantu, and may even be remotely akin to it, judging from their tendency to prefix formations[217]." Future research will show how far this conjecture is justified.

Although Islam has made considerable progress, throughout the greater part of the Sudanese region, though not among the Nilotic tribes, the bulk of the people are still practically pagan. Witchcraft continues to flourish amongst the equatorial peoples, and important events are almost everywhere attended by sanguinary rites. These are absent among the true Nilotics. The Dinka are totemic, with ancestor-worship. The Shilluk have a cult of divine kings.

Cannibalism however, in some of its most repulsive forms, prevails amongst the Zandehs, who barter in human fat as a universal staple of trade, and amongst the Mangbattu, who cure for future use the bodies of the slain in battle and "drive their prisoners before them, as butchers drive sheep to the shambles, and these are only reserved to fall victims on a later day to their horrible and sickly greediness[218]."

In fact here we enter the true "cannibal zone," which, as I have elsewhere shown, was in former ages diffused all over Central and South Africa, or, it would be more correct to say, over the whole continent[219], but has in recent times been mainly confined to "the region stretching west and east from the Gulf of Guinea to the western head-streams of the White Nile, and from below the equator northwards in the direction of Adamawa, Dar-Banda and Dar-Fertit. Wherever explorers have penetrated into this least-known region of the continent they have found the practice fully established, not merely as a religious rite or a privilege reserved for priests, but as a recognised social institution[220]."

Yet many of these cannibal peoples, especially the Mangbattus and Zandehs, are skilled agriculturists, and cultivate some of the useful industries, such as iron and copper smelting and casting, weaving, pottery and wood-carving, with great success. The form and ornamental designs of their utensils display real artistic taste, while the temper of their iron implements is often superior to that of the imported European hardware. Here again the observation has been made that the tribes most addicted to cannibalism also excel in mental qualities and physical energy. Nor are they strangers to the finer feelings of human nature, and above all the surrounding peoples the Zandeh anthropophagists are distinguished by their regard and devotion for their women and children.

In one respect all these peoples show a higher degree of intelligence even than the Arabs and Hamites. "My later experiences," writes Junker, "revealed the remarkable fact that certain negro peoples, such as the Niam-Niams, the Mangbattus and the Bantus of Uganda and Unyoro, display quite a surprising understanding of figured illustrations or pictures of plastic objects, which is not as a rule exhibited by the Arabs and Arabised Hamites of North-east Africa. Thus the Unyoro chief, Riongo, placed photographs in their proper position, and was able to identify the negro portraits as belonging to the Shuli, Lango, or other tribes, of which he had a personal knowledge. This I have called a remarkable fact, because it bespoke in the lower races a natural faculty for observation, a power to recognise what for many Arabs or Egyptians of high rank was a hopeless puzzle. An Egyptian pasha in Khartum could never make out how a human face in profile showed only one eye and one ear, and he took the portrait of a fashionable Parisian lady in extremely low dress for that of the bearded sun-burnt American naval officer who had shown him the photograph[221]." From this one is almost tempted to infer that, amongst Moslem peoples, all sense of plastic, figurative, or pictorial art has been deadened by the Koranic precept forbidding the representation of the human form in any way.

The Welle peoples show themselves true Negroes in the possession of another and more precious quality, the sense of humour, although this is probably a quality which comes late in the life of a race. Anyhow it is a distinct Negro characteristic, which Junker was able to turn to good account during the building of his famous Lacrima station in Ndoruma's country. "In all this I could again notice how like children the Negroes are in many respects. Once at work they seemed animated by a sort of childlike sense of honour. They delighted in praise, though even a frown or a word of reproach could also excite their hilarity. Thus a loud burst of laughter would, for instance, follow the contrast between a piece of good and bad workmanship. Like children, they would point the finger of scorn at each other[222]."

One morning Ndoruma, hearing that they had again struck work, had the great war-drum beaten, whereupon they rushed to arms and mustered in great force from all quarters. But on finding that there was no enemy to march against, and that they had only been summoned to resume operations at the station, they enjoyed the joke hugely, and after a general explosion of laughter at the way they had been taken in, laid aside their weapons and returned cheerfully to work. Some English overseers have already discovered that this characteristic may be utilised far more effectively than the cruel kurbash. Ethnology has many such lessons to teach.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] For a tentative classification of African tribes see T. A. Joyce, Art. "Africa: Ethnology," Ency. Brit. 1910, p. 329.

[130] Graphically summed up in the classical description of the Negress:

"Afra genus, tota patriam testante figura, Torta comam labroque tumens, et fusca colorem, Pectore lata, jacens mammis, compressior alvo, Cruribus exilis, spatiosa prodiga planta."

[131] See H. R. Hall, papers and references in Man, 19, 1905.

[132] T. A. Joyce, "Africa: Ethnology," Ency. Brit. 1910, I. 327.

[133] J. P. Johnson, The Prehistoric Period in South Africa, 1912.

[134] See H. H. Johnston, "A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLIII. 1913.

[135] The skeleton found by Hans Reck at Oldoway in 1914 and claimed by him to be of Pleistocene age exhibits all the typical Negro features, including the filed teeth, characteristic of East African negroes at the present day, but the geological evidence is imperfect.

[136] H. H. Johnston, British Central Africa, 1897, p. 393.

[137] Zandeh is the name usually given to the groups of tribes akin to Nilotics, but probably with Fulah element, which includes the Azandeh or Niam Niam, Makaraka, Mangbattu and many others. Cf. T. A. Joyce, loc. cit. p. 329.

[138] British Central Africa, p. 472. But see R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind, 1906, and A. G. Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, for African mentality.

[139] For theories of Bantu migrations see H. H. Johnston, George Grenfell and the Congo, 1908, and "A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Soc. XLIII. 1913, p. 391 ff. Also F. Stuhlmann, Handwerk und Industrie in Ostafrika, 1910, p. 138, f. 147, with map, Pl. 1. B. For the date see p. 92.

[140] Even a tendency to polysynthesis occurs, as in Vei, and in Yoruba, where the small-pox god Shakpanna is made up of the three elements shan to plaster, kpa to kill, and enia a person = one who kills a person by plastering him (with pustules).

[141] The Nilotic languages are to a considerable extent tonic.

[142] A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-speaking Peoples, etc., 1887, pp. 327-8. Only one European, Herr R. Betz, long resident amongst the Dualas of the Cameruns district, has yet succeeded in mastering the drum language; he claims to understand nearly all that is drummed and is also able to drum himself. (Athenaeum, May 7, 1898, p. 611.)

[143] Cf. H. S. Harrison, Handbook to the cases illustrating stages in the evolution of the Domestic Arts. Part II. Horniman Museum and Library. Forest Hill, S.E.

[144] E. T. Hamy, "Les Races Negres," in L'Anthropologie, 1897, p. 257 sq.

[145] "Chaque fois que j'ai demande avec intention a un Mande, 'Es-tu Peul, Mossi, Dafina?' il me repondait invariablement, 'Je suis Mande.' C'est pourquoi, dans le cours de ma relation, j'ai toujours designe ce peuple par le nom de Mande, qui est son vrai nom." (L. G. Binger, Du Niger au Golfe de Guinee, 1892, Vol. II. p. 373.) At p. 375 this authority gives the following subdivisions of the Mande family, named from their respective tenne (idol, fetish, totem):

1. Bamba, the crocodile: Bammana, not Bambara, which means kafir or infidel, and is applied only to the non-Moslem Mande groups.

2. Mali, the hippopotamus: Mali'nke, including the Kagoros and the Tagwas.

3. Sama, the elephant: Sama'nke.

4. Sa, the snake: Sa-mokho.

Of each there are several sub-groups, while the surrounding peoples call them all collectively Wakore, Wangara, Sakhersi, and especially Diula. Attention to this point will save the reader much confusion in consulting Barth, Caillie, and other early books of travel.

[146] Travels, Vol. IV. p. 579 sqq.

[147] "La chaine des Montagnes de Kong n'a jamais existe que dans l'imagination de quelques voyageurs mal renseignes," Du Niger au Golfe de Guinee, 1892, I. p. 285.

[148] Bertrand-Bocande, "Sur les Floups ou Feloups," in Bul. Soc. de Geogr. 1849.

[149] A full account of this literature will be found in the Rev. C. F. Schlenker's valuable work, A Collection of Temne Traditions, Fables and Proverbs, London, 1861. Here is given the curious explanation of the tribal name, from o-tem, an old man, and ne, himself, because, as they say, the Temne people will exist for ever.

[150] There is also a sisterhood--the bondo--and the two societies work so far in harmony that any person expelled from the one is also excluded from the other.

[151] Reclus, Keane's English ed., XII. p. 203.

[152] "Da Njoe Testament, translated into the Negro-English Language by the Missionaries of the Unitas Fratrum," Brit. and For. Bible Soc., London, 1829. Here is a specimen quoted by Ellis from The Artisan of Sierra Leone, Aug. 4, 1886, "Those who live in ceiled houses love to hear the pit-pat of the rain overhead; whilst those whose houses leak are the subjects of restlessness and anxiety, not to mention the chances of catching cold, that is so frequent a source of leaky roofs."

[153] Right Rev. E. G. Ingham (Bishop of Sierra Leone), Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, London, 1894, p. 294. Cf. H. C. Lukach, A Bibliography of Sierra Leone, 1911, and T. J. Alldridge, A Transformed Colony, 1910.

[154] This increase, however, appears to be due to a steady immigration from the Southern States, but for which the Liberians proper would die out, or become absorbed in the surrounding native populations.

[155] H. H. Johnston, Liberia, 1906.

[156] Possibly the English word "crew," but more probably an extension of Kraoh, the name of a tribe near Settra-kru, to the whole group.

[157] Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, p. 280.

[158] Mary H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, 1899, pp. 54-5.

[159] Since the establishment of British authority in Nigeria (1900 to 1907) much light has been thrown on ethnological problems. See among other works C. Partridge, The Cross River Natives, 1905; A. G. Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906; A. J. N. Tremearne, The Niger and the Western Sudan, 1910, The Tailed Head-Hunters of Nigeria, 1912; R. E. Dennett, Nigerian Studies, 1910; E. D. Morel, Nigeria, its People and its Problems, 1911, besides the Anthropological Reports of N. W. Thomas, 1910, 1913, and papers by J. Parkinson in Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XXXVI. 1906, XXXVII. 1907.

[160] The services rendered to African anthropology by this distinguished officer call for the fullest recognition, all the more that somewhat free and unacknowledged use has been made of the rich materials brought together in his classical works on The Tshi-speaking Peoples (1887), The Ewe-speaking Peoples (1890), and The Yoruba-speaking Peoples (1894).

[161] N. W. Thomas classifies Yoruba, Edo, Ibo and Efik as four main stocks in the Western Sudanic language group. "In the Edo and Ibo stocks people only a few miles apart may not be able to communicate owing to diversity of language" (p. 141). Anthropological Report of the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria, Part 1. 1913.

[162] The Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 332 sq.

[163] Feitico, whence also feiticeira, a witch, feiticeria, sorcery, etc., all from feitico, artificial, handmade, from Lat. facio and factitius.

[164] Du Culte des Dieux Fetiches, 1760. It is generally supposed that the word was invented, or at least first introduced, by De Brosses; but Ellis shows that this also is a mistake, as it had already been used by Bosman in his Description of Guinea, London, 1705.

[165] The Tshi-speaking Peoples, Ch. XII. p. 194 and passim. See also R. H. Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, 1904.

[166] That is, from a wax mould destroyed in the casting. After the operation details were often filled in by chasing or executed in repousse work.

[167] "Works of Art from Benin City," Journ. Anthr. Inst. February, 1898, p. 362 sq. See H. Ling Roth, Great Benin, its Customs, etc., 1903.

[168] A. Featherman, Social History of Mankind, The Nigritians, p. 281. See also Reclus, French ed., Vol. XII. p. 718: "Les cavaliers portent encore la cuirasse comme au moyen age.... Les chevaux sont recouverts de la meme maniere." In the mythical traditions of Buganda also there is reference to the fierce Wakedi warriors clad in "iron armour" (Ch. IV.). Cf. L. Frobenius, The Voice of Africa, II. 1913, pl. p. 608.

[169] Du Niger au Golfe de Guinee, 1892, I. p. 377.

[170] Early in the fourteenth century they were strong enough to carry the war into the enemy's camp and make more than one successful expedition against Timbuktu. At present the Mossi power is declining, and their territory has been parcelled out between the British and French Sudanese hinterlands.

[171] Also Sonrhay, gh and rh being interchangeable throughout North Africa; Ghat and Rhat, Ghadames and Rhadames, etc. In the mouth of an Arab the sound is that of the guttural [Symbol], ghain, which is pronounced by the Berbers and Negroes somewhat like the Northumberland burr, hence usually transliterated by rh in non-Semitic words.

[172] It should be noticed that these terms are throughout used as strictly defined in Eth. Ch. I.

[173] Barth's account of Wulu (IV. p. 299), "inhabited by Tawarek slaves, who are trilingues, speaking Temashight as well as Songhay and Fulfulde," is at present generally applicable, mutatis mutandis, to most of the Songhai settlements.

[174] As so much has been made of Barth's authority in this connection, it may be well to quote his exact words: "It would seem as if they (the Sonrhay) had received, in more ancient times, several institutions from the Egyptians, with whom, I have no doubt, they maintained an intercourse by means of the energetic inhabitants of Aujila from a relatively ancient period" (IV. p. 426). Barth, therefore, does not bring the people themselves, or their language, from Egypt, but only some of their institutions, and that indirectly through the Aujila Oasis in Cyrenaica, and it may be added that this intercourse with Aujila appears to date only from about 1150 A.D. (IV. p. 585).

[175] Hacquard et Dupuis, Manuel de la langue Songay, parlee de Tombouctou a Say, dans la boucle du Niger, 1897, passim.

[176] "A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Soc. XLIII. 1913, p. 386.

[177] Barth, IV. pp. 593-4.

[178] The Ischia of Leo Africanus, who tells us that in his time the "linguaggio detto Sungai" was current even in the provinces of Walata and Jinni (VI. ch. 2). This statement, however, like others made by Leo at second hand, must be received with caution. In these districts Songhai may have been spoken by the officials and some of the upper classes, but scarcely by the people generally, who were of Mandingan speech.

[179] Barth, IV. p. 414.

[180] Ib. p. 415.

[181] Carried captive into Marakesh, although later restored to his beloved Timbuktu to end his days in perpetuating the past glories of the Songhai nation; the one Negroid man of letters, whose name holds a worthy place beside those of Leo Africanus, Ibn Khaldun, El Tunsi, and other Hamitic writers.

[182] "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes Intulit agresti Latio." Hor. Epist. II. 1, 156-7.

The epithet agrestis is peculiarly applicable to the rude Fulah shepherds, who were almost barbarians compared with the settled, industrious, and even cultured Hausa populations, and whose oppressive rule has at last been relaxed by the intervention of England in the Niger-Benue lands.

[183] "One of their towns, Kano, has probably the largest market-place in the world, with a daily attendance of from 25,000 to 30,000 people. This same town possesses, what in central Africa is still more surprising, some thirty or forty schools, in which the children are taught to read and write" (Rev. C. H. Robinson, Specimens of Hausa Literature, University Press, Cambridge, 1896, p. x).

[184] See C. H. Robinson, Hausaland, or Fifteen Hundred Miles through the Central Soudan, 1896; Specimens of Hausa Literature, 1896; Hausa Grammar, 1897; Hausa Dictionary, 1899. Authorities are undecided whether to class Hausa with the Semitic or the Hamitic family, or in an independent group by itself, and it must be admitted that some of its features are extremely puzzling. While Sudanese Negro in phonology and perhaps in most of its word roots, it is Hamitic in its grammatical features and pronouns. But the Hamitic element is thought by experts to be as much Kushite, or even Koptic, as Libyan. "On the whole, it seems probable," says H. H. Johnston, "that the Hausa speech was shaped by a double influence: from Egypt, and Hamiticized Nubia, as well as by Libyan immigrants from across the Sahara." "A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Soc. XLIII. 1913, p. 385. Cf. also Julius Lippert, "Ueber die Stellung der Hausasprache," Mitteilungen des Seminaers fuer Orientalische Sprachen, 1906. It is noteworthy that Hausa is the only language in tropical Africa which has been reduced to writing by the natives themselves.

[185] Campaigning on the Upper Nile and Niger, by Lt Seymour Vandeleur, with an Introduction by Sir George Goldie, 1898. "In camp," writes Lt Vandeleur, "their conduct was exemplary, while pillaging and ill-treatment of the natives were unknown. As to their fighting qualities, it is enough to say that, little over 500 strong (on the Bida expedition of 1897), they withstood for two days 25,000 or 30,000 of the enemy; that, former slaves of the Fulahs, they defeated their dreaded masters," etc.

[186] The Kano Chronicle, translated by H. R. Palmer, Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XXXVIII. 1908, gives a list of Hausa kings (Sarkis) from 999 A.D.

[187] For references to recent literature see note on p. 58. Also R. S. Rattray, Hausa Folk-lore, 1913; A. J. N. Tremearne, Hausa Superstitions and Customs, 1913, and Hausa Folk-Tales, 1914.

[188] By a popular etymology these are Ka-Nuri, "People of Light." But, as they are somewhat lukewarm Muhammadans, the zealous Fulahs say it should be Ka-Nari, "People of Fire," i.e. foredoomed to Gehenna!

[189] E. Gentil, La Chute de l'Empire de Rabah, 1902.

[190] The Buduma, who derive their legendary origin from the Fulahs whom they resemble in physique, worship the Karraka tree (a kind of acacia). P. A. Talbot, "The Buduma of Lake Chad," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLI. 1911. The anthropology of the region has lately been dealt with in Documents Scientifiques de la Mission Tilho (1906-9), Republique Francaise, Ministere des Colonies, Vol. III. 1914; R. Gaillard and L. Poutrin, Etude anthropologique des Populations des Regions du Tchad et du Kanem, 1914.

[191] III. p. 194.

[192] Sahara and Sudan, II. p. 628.

[193] II. pp. 382-3.

[194] That is "Kanem-men," the postfix bu, be, as in Ti-bu, Ful-be, answering to the Bantu prefix ba, wa, as in Ba-Suto, Wa-Swahili, etc. Here may possibly be discovered a link between the Sudanese, Teda-Daza, and Bantu linguistic groups. The transposition of the agglutinated particles would present no difficulty; cf. Umbrian and Latin (Eth. p. 214). The Kanembu are described by Tilho, who explored the Chad basin, 1906-9. His reports were published in 1914. Republique Francaise Ministere des Colonies, Documents Scientifiques de la Mission Tilho (1906-9), Vol. III. 1914.

[195] Barth draws a vivid picture of the contrasts, physical and mental, between the Kanuri and the Hausa peoples; "Here we took leave of Hausa with its fine and beautiful country, and its cheerful and industrious population. It is remarkable what a difference there is between the character of the ba-Haushe and the Kanuri--the former lively, spirited, and cheerful, the latter melancholic, dejected, and brutal; and the same difference is visible in their physiognomies--the former having in general very pleasant and regular features, and more graceful forms, while the Kanuri, with his broad face, his wide nostrils and his large bones, makes a far less agreeable impression, especially the women, who are very plain and certainly among the ugliest in all Negroland" (II. pp. 163-4).

[196] See Nachtigal, II. p. 690.

[197] For recent literature see Lady Lugard's A Tropical Dependency, 1905, and the references, note 3, p. 58.

[198] These are the same people as the Tunjurs (Tunzers) of Darfur, regarding whose ethnical position so much doubt still prevails. Strange to say, they themselves claim to be Arabs, and the claim is allowed by their neighbours, although they are not Muhammadans. Lejean thinks they are Tibus from the north-west, while Nachtigal, who met some as far west as Kanem, concluded from their appearance and speech that they were really Arabs settled for hundreds of years in the country (op. cit. II. p. 256).

[199] A. H. Keane, "Wadai," Travel and Exploration, July, 1910; and H. H. Johnston, on Lieut. Boyd Alexander, Geog. Journ. same date.

[200] H. A. MacMichael has investigated the value of these racial claims in the case of the Kababish and indicates the probable admixture of Negro, Mediterranean, Hamite and other strains in the Sudanese Arabs. He says, "Among the more settled tribes any important sheikh or faki can produce a table of his ancestors (i.e. a nisba) in support of his asseverations.... I asked a village sheikh if he could show me his pedigree, as I did not know from which of the exalted sources his particular tribe claimed descent. He replied that he did not know yet, but that his village had subscribed 60 piastres the month before to hire a faki to compose a nisba for them, and that he would show me the result when it was finished." "The Kababish: Some Remarks on the Ethnology of a Sudan Arab Tribe," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XL. 1910, p. 216.

[201] See the Kababish types, Pl. XXXVII in C. G. Seligman's "Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLIII. 1913, but cf. also p. 626 and n. 2.

[202] "The Physical Characters of the Nuba of Kordofan," _Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst._ XL. 1910, "Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem," etc., tom. cit. XLIII. 1913.

[203] See H. A. MacMichael, The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan, 1912.

[204] Cf. A. W. Tucker and C. S. Myers, "A Contribution to the Anthropology of the Sudan," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XL. 1910, p. 149.

[205] This term, however, has by some authorities been identified with the Barabara, one of the 113 tribes recorded in the inscription on a gateway of Thutmes, by whom they were reduced about 1700 B.C. In a later inscription of Rameses II at Karnak (1400 B.C.) occurs the form Beraberata, name of a southern people conquered by him. Hence Brugsch (Reisebericht aus AEgypten, pp. 127 and 155) is inclined to regard the modern Barabra as a true ethnical name confused in classical times with the Greek and Roman Barbarus, but revived in its proper sense since the Moslem conquest. See also the editorial note on the term Berber, in the new English ed. of Leo Africanus, Vol. 1. p. 199.

[206] [Greek:'Ex aristeron de ruseos tou Neilou Noubai katoikousin en te Libue, mega ethnos], etc. (Book XVII. p. 1117, Oxford ed. 1807). Sayce, therefore, is quite wrong in stating that Strabo knew only of "Ethiopians," and not Nubians, "as dwelling northward along the banks of the Nile as far as Elephantine" (Academy, April 14, 1894).

[207] Nubische Grammatik, 1881, passim.

[208] B. Z. Seligman, "Note on the Languages of the Nubas of S. Kordofan," Zeitschr. f. Kol.-spr. I. 1910-11; C. G. Seligman, "Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem," etc., Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLIII. 1913, p. 621 ff.

[209] See A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 74.

[210] C. G. Seligman, "The Physical Characters of the Nuba of Kordofan," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XL. 1910, p. 512, and "Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem," etc., Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLIII. 1913, passim.

[211] Archaeological Survey of India, Bull. III. p. 25.

[212] See note 1, p. 44.

[213] Op. cit. I. p. 263.

[214] Travels in Africa, Keane's English ed., Vol. III. p. 247.

[215] Ibid. p. 246.

[216] C. G. Seligman, Art. "Dinka," Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. See also the same author's "Cult of Nyakangano the Divine Kings of the Shilluk," Fourth Report Wellcome Research Lab. Khartoum, Vol. B, 1911, p. 216; S. L. Cummins, Journ. Anthr. Inst. XXXIV. 1904, and H. O'Sullivan, "Dinka Laws and Customs," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XL. 1910. Measurements of Dinka, Shilluk etc. are given by A. W. Tucker and C. S. Myers, "A Contribution to the Anthropology of the Sudan," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XL. 1910. G. A. S. Northcote, "The Nilotic Kavirondo," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XXXVI. 1907, describes an allied people, the Jaluo.

[217] Travels in Africa, Keane's Eng. ed., III. p. 279. Thus the Bantu Ba, Wa, Ama, etc., correspond to the A of the Welle lands, as in A-Zandeh, A-Barmbo, A-Madi, A-Bangba, i.e. Zandeh people, Barmbo people, etc. Cf. also Kanem_bu_, Ti_bu_, Ful_be_, etc., where the personal particle (bu, be) is postfixed. It would almost seem as if we had here a transition between the northern Sudanese and the southern Bantu groups in the very region where such transitions might be looked for.

[218] Schweinfurth, op. cit. II. p. 93.

[219] G. Elliot Smith denies that cannibalism occurred in Ancient Egypt, The Ancient Egyptians, 1911, p. 48.

[220] Africa, 1895, Vol. II. p. 58. In a carefully prepared monograph on "Endocannibalismus," Vienna, 1896, Dr Rudolf S. Steinmetz brings together a great body of evidence tending to show "dass eine hohe Wahrscheinlichkeit dafuer spricht den Endocannibalismus (indigenous anthropophagy) als staendige Sitte der Urmenschen, sowie der niedrigen Wilden anzunehmen" (pp. 59, 60). It is surprising to learn from the ill-starred Bottego-Grixoni expedition of 1892-3 that anthropophagy is still rife even in Gallaland, and amongst the white ("floridi") Cormoso Gallas. Like the Fans, these prefer the meat "high," and it would appear that all the dead are eaten. Hence in their country Bottego found no graves, and one of his native guides explained that "questa gente seppellisce i suoi cari nel ventre, invece che nella terra," i.e. these people bury their dear ones in their stomach instead of in the ground. Vittorio Bottego, Viaggi di Scoperta, etc. Rome, 1895.

[221] I. p. 245.

[222] II. p. 140.

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