DISEASES.
Small-pox is prevalent, Cholera rarely attacks the country, but it is known. Dysentery is very common in the White Nile districts, but it is rare in the highlands. This complaint is generally fatal at Gondokoro. Great caution should be used, and impure water avoided. Marsh fever is the general complaint of the low ground, but is rare in the highlands of Fatiko and Unyoro.
I have never met with typhoid fevers in Central Africa, although they are common at Khartoum.
Measles, whooping-cough, scarlatina, croup, diphtheria, are quite unknown.
Blindness is only the result of extreme age, and is very rare. I never saw a case of mania, nor have I ever met more than one idiot in Central Africa. The brain appears to be exercised as a simple muscle of the body, and is never overstrained by deep thought or by excessive study. There are no great commercial or parliamentary anxieties; no struggles to keep up appearances and position in society against the common enemy, "small means;" no hearts to break with overwhelming love; but the human beings of Central Africa live as animals, simply using the brain as a director of their daily wants. Thus in their simple state they never commit suicide and never go mad. Their women never give birth to cripples or monsters, as the sympathetic uterus continues in harmony with the healthy brain.
I have seen only two dwarfs. These were in Unyoro, one of whom was described by Speke (Kimenya): he is since dead. The other was at the court of Kabba Rega, named Rakoomba. We measured this little fellow, who was exactly three feet and half-an inch in height, at the age of about eighteen years.
The teeth are remarkable throughout Central Africa. I have examined great numbers of skulls, and I never found a decayed tooth. Many tribes extract the four front teeth of the lower jaw. The bone then closes, and forms a sharp edge like the jaw of a turtle.
MAMMALIA*
(*Mr. Sclater, of the Zoological Society of London, has furnished me with the scientific names of the antelopes and other mammals.)
The principal animals and birds in the Shooli country are:—