not Negro, unless our ordinary conception of the Negro is a good deal revised. As Livingstone says of the Makololo, so of all these, they are a “coffee-and-milk color;” or we may say all these peoples are from a dark coffee-brown to brownish-white, like coffee, depending on the amount of milk added. They are mostly tall, straight, leanish, wiry, active, of rather regular features, fair agriculturists and cattle-raisers, with much mechanical capacity, born merchants and traders, and almost everywhere hold darker and more truly negro tribes in slavery to themselves, where any such tribes exist. Where they have none or few domestic animals for meat, they are frequently cannibals. In the middle Congo basin the tribes are more truly Negro, and here the true Negroes are freemen, independent and capable, though in a somewhat low state of development. But, so far as now known, the true Negro, in an independent condition, holds and rules but a comparatively small part of Africa. As to capability for improvement these peoples—the Negroid races at least and probably the Negroes—are as apt and civilizable as any Caucasian or Mongolian people have originally been, if we consider how their geographical and climatic isolation has hitherto cut them off from the rest of the world and the world from them. We know that if we leave Revelation out of the account, all Caucasian civilization, whether Aryan, Semitic, or Hamitic, can be traced backward till, just on the dawn of history, it narrows down to small clans or families, with whom the light began and from whom it spread. We know the same, also, as to the non-Caucasian Chinese and Nahua civilizations of Asia and America. Had the spread of the germs of these civilizations been prevented by conditions like those in Africa, who shall say that the stage of development might not be about the same to-day? There seems to be but one uncivilizable race—if, indeed, they are such—in Africa; and that is the dwarfs. The Akka, found by Schweinfurth south of the Welle, called themselves “Betua,” the same word as the “Batua” on the Kassai. The dwarfs of the upper Zambesi call themselves by a similar word, and so with the Bushmen in South Africa. Many things go to prove that these dwarf nations are all one race, the diminutive remnants of a primeval stock of one of the lowest types of man, who have never risen above
the hunter stage of life. They have been scattered, and almost exterminated, by the incoming of the powerful Bantu stock, that is now spread from the Soudan to Zululand. These dwarfs are the best living examples of similar races once scattered over Europe and Asia, whose real existence lies at the bottom of all the lore of fairies, brownies, elfs, gnomes, etc. They constitute one of the most pregnant subjects of study in all anthropology. They are seemingly always uncivilizable.”
In his “Africa in a Nutshell,” Rev. Geo. Thompson thus sketches the country, especially the central belt:—
“The Central Belt of Africa—say from 15° north to 15° south of the equator, about 2,000 miles in width—is, heavily-timbered, of the jungle nature. There are numerous large trees (one to six feet through, and 50 to 150 feet high) with smaller ones, and bushes intermingled, while vines of various kinds intertwine, from bottom to top, making progress through them, except in paths, very difficult. Only experience can give a realizing idea of an African forest—of the tangle, and the density of its shade.
“While traveling through them, even in the dry season, when the sun shines brightest, one cannot see or feel the warming rays. The leaves drip with the dews of the night, and the traveler becomes chilled, and suffers exceedingly.
“But the whole country is not now covered with such forests. They are found in places, from ten to twenty-five miles in extent, where the population is sparse, but the larger portion of the country has been cleared off and cultivated; and, while much of it is in crops all the time, other large patches are covered with bushes, of from one to three years’ growth—for they clear off a new place every year. The farm of this year is left to grow up to bushes two or three years, to kill out the grass, and then it is cleared off again. Thus, in thickly settled portions of the country, but little large timber is found, except along rivers, or on mountains. Such is the country north of the Gulf of Guinea, to near the Desert.
“The people are numerous, and the cities larger (the largest cities in Africa; they are from one to six miles through), and much of the country is under cultivation. And so of the central portion of Africa, in the vicinity of Lake Tchad.
CHASING GIRAFFES.