Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by J. B. Lippincott & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Transcriber's notes: Minor typos have been corrected. Table of contents has been generated for HTML version.

MOSQUE AND DWELLING OF MARABOUTS, KOUKOU.
Remains of old nationalities are scattered in odd corners all over the earth. Every land, almost, possesses a relic of the kind markedly different from the specimens preserved elsewhere, and peculiar enough to give color to the old theory of its having sprung from the soil. These torn and battered shreds of humanity are usually found lodged among the rocks, the blast of foreign invasion having driven them thither from the plains. The mountains not only give them shelter, but seem to reinfuse new vigor, and thus in many cases enable them to exert more or less of a reflex influence on their conquerors. This influence varies with the character of the country and of the respective races. The invaders, if actuated by civilizing impulses and not mere military ambition, will make themselves useful and necessary to the natives, develop what capacity they have, and absorb them politically. In the opposite case fusion is not effected, and a degree of antagonism is maintained which breaks out on occasion into actual hostilities. Between these two extreme cases we may trace an infinity of examples, modified by endless combinations of circumstances and conditions.
In Great Britain we see the Gael whirled up by successive gusts from Italy, the Elbe and Normandy into the clefts of the Welsh and Scottish mountains. France has driven her aborigines into the peninsula of Brittany and the gorges of the Eastern Pyrenees. The Finns find refuge among the frozen swamps north-east of St. Petersburg. The ethnic museum of mountainous Spain is more rich and varied than that of her Northern neighbors, and Italy has remnants dating back into the night of historic time in Sardinia and the Abruzzi. Japan, ancient as she is, has her Ainos of unrecorded antiquity, and the ranges of Central India are haunted by races still more primitive and unprepossessing in manners and physiognomy. Over the plains of both continents so many successive waves of population have swept that no race can claim more than a comparative antiquity. The traceable pedigree of any given community becomes very short indeed, and the inquirer contents himself with conceding that the Thibetan sept which arrogates descent from Alexander's Greeks may do so with truth—say as much truth as there was in the descent of certain straw-colored Creeks and Choctaws from the followers of De Soto.