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the pigmy Wambutti and the Akkas of the Congo forest, the Batwa of the Central Congo plains, the Akoas and Obongos of the Gaboon, and the Bushmen of South Africa.

What the pigmies' average height may have originally been it is difficult to state; but, by comparing the old Egyptian sculpture of a pigmy as he stands by an ordinary man of the past with a photograph of a modern pigmy and a modern man of the average height, it does not appear that the pigmy has improved in stature. The circumstances of his surroundings are much the same to-day as they must have been in the past. He is still the wild, shy man of the woods or desert, as he is represented to have been in the times of his earliest discoverers. He lives the same precarious existence, in earth burrows, or diminutive huts, preying on insects, ground game and mud fish, or on what he can steal from his taller neighbors. In central or southern Africa his presence has been a nuisance to the tillers of the soil, as well as to shepherds and herdsmen, and it has been resented continually, and prompt vengeance taken on him for his depredations. While his neighborhood has affected some of the taller tribes, as we may see in the dwarfish individuals found among them, his tribe seems not to have been affected at all; from which we may infer that when his sisters were made captive they met different treatment from that which he dealt to his captives. Here and there among the East and West Coast tribes, we meet with traces of a long residence of the pigmies near them. To-day the pigmies may not be found within hundreds of miles of them, but the clayey complexion, tufted hair and low stature are unmistakable proofs that at one time female pigmies have cohabited with males of the taller race.

The pure negroes are in a great majority over all other races in Africa, and are almost as much scattered over the continent as we believe the Turanians were over the world; but, wherever located, they are easily recognizable among their colored congeners.

That the reader may not be wearied with African names, it is best to divide Africa into divisions.

The first, beginning from the west, includes the Niger basin and its outskirts. The most prominent peoples in it are the Haussa, Yorubas, Fantis, Mandingoes, Wangara, Kanuri and Baghermis. These generally are of average height, but vary greatly in complexion, from dead black to dingy yellow. The darker are more often found along the coast, those on the desert border are much mixed with Berbers and Afro-Semitics from the east. The masses in the interior, though distinctly negro in complexion and physical character, possess considerable aptitudes for progress, as if long ago a higher race had impregnated them.

The second division comprises all that vast territory extending to the Nile from the fifteenth degree of east longitude, and southerly along the line of Nile waters and westward of the lake region down to the Zambesi River. The best known of these tribes are the Shilluks, Dinkas, Nuba, Niam-Niam, Mabodé, Azangé, Baris and the Congo tribes, such as the Manyema, Bakongo, Bateke, By-yanzi, Balunda, Balua and the Zambesi-Marotse, and others. In this division, the number of sub-tribes is immense. Except on the Nile shores, scarcely any of these tribes would be called black by an expert in African color, but rather a varying brown, between a light bronze and a brown verging on blackness. They are all, however, pure negro in type and are probably the finest specimens of unmixed negro humanity in Africa, being well developed and of great muscular strength. Few of these peoples in the central region have shown such advance in native manufactures as may be seen in Nigeria, but capacity for improvement is evinced by the beautiful brass and iron ornaments and weapons of the Mabodé and By-yanzi, by the hut architecture and domestic utensils of the Monbuttu, the grass cloths of the Bateke and the trading shrewdness and enterprise of the By-yanzi.

If we proceed now to the eastern division, which stretches from the Jub River to the Limpopo, and take a depth inland of about 300 miles, we find another set of negro tribes remarkably like those met in the second division, of good height, well set, and admirably muscular. Where the land is low, as in the immediate hinterland, the climate is hot and moist and the tribes are of a livid black, but immediately the highlands are reached the complexion lightens and the physique of the people improves. Many of the children, as in Ugogo and Unyamwezi, are almost fair in comparison with their parents. Nearer the coast land, many individuals among the tribes exhibit the effect of contact with a low-statured race.

The eastern sea fringe is occupied by a very mixed race, wherein may be traced repeated blendings with migrants from foreign stocks. It requires no great discernment to perceive that the indigenous peoples have freely mixed with Somalis, Gallas, Abyssinians, Arabs, East Indians and perhaps Jews, Sabæans and Phœnicians. The complexion of the people is of all shades from deep black to light olive, and the hair also proves the effects of foreign blood, though, as the foreigners were not in such numbers as to form a permanent race, there is a continued tendency toward reversion.

The most interesting division is the eastern central, which lies between the lakes and the eastern division; because, without doubt, it marks the highway of the warrior tribes which advanced in repeated waves toward the south, absorbed whole tribes of the autochthonous peoples blended with them, and formed a superior and victorious negroid race. It is easy to trace the march of this race through the ordinary negro tribes, by the physical superiority, the taller stature, the courage, discipline, organization and warring propensities of its descendants. The traditions of the natives also guide us as to the direction whence their ancestors came.

In my opinion, two streams of migrants flowed from the base of the Abyssinian Mountains-one from the direction of Senaar and Fazogl, and the other from Shoa. On approaching the Victoria Nile, the first crossed into Unyoro, and thence south between the lakes; the second advanced by way of Turkan and Kavirondo and overspread what is called the Great Rift Valley. It is clear that the first stream was the largest, because all trace of the second seems to be lost about the sixth degree of south latitude, while the course of the other is perceptible among the Kafirs at the Cape and the Zulus of Natal.

Before the conquering march of this host, the primitive peoples fled into the places of refuge which lay on either side of the route, such as the islands in the lakes, the higher slopes of Ruwenzori, and Mfumbiro mountains, the Congo forest, and other out-of-the-way resorts. It is among the descendants of these refugees that one may find customs and habits reminding us of the fish-eaters (the Ichthyophagi), the "Cave Dwellers," and the nomadic "Blemmyes" of Arabia. These tribes are always subordinate to the descendants of the conquerors who settled and occupied the lands, and who are to-day known as Wanyoro, Waganda, Wanyambu, Waha, Wafipa, Wangoni, Matabele, Zulu, etc.

Some of these are more negrified than others. They all have the woolly hair and many among them are as negroid in feature as the purest negro; but the majority still retain points in their physiognomies which stamp them as descendants of the old Ethiopian stock, which has fertilized this belt of African humanity.

The Wanyambu further south than the Waganda, and the Wanyankori also, exhibit as close an affinity with the Abyssinians as the Wanyoro. In their lengthy limbs and their slender build, as well as in their refined features and small hands, they prove their descent. Among various tribes further south, such as the Wakaranga and Wanyamwezi, the Watusi herdsmen again maintain the tradition; and, though surrounded by powerful negro tribes, they refuse to be contaminated by intermarriage with them, and strike the traveller at once by their tall, slender, elegant figures, expressive eyes and delicate features. But for the hair, they might be taken for a tribe of Bishari lately imported into this region.

As we proceed south, we enter a region where the negro blood and type predominate, but a few hundred miles beyond it we pick up the trail of the Ethiopian again in the Wangoni country, only to lose it, however, beyond their boundary. Across the Zambesi in the Matabele country, we recognize the type once more, and behold the familiar features of Waha, Wakeréwé and Waganda, whenever an Indaba is held. Beyond the Matabele are the Zulus, who resemble very strongly the best class of Waganda.

In Cape Colony, the extremity of Africa, where humanity has whirled about considerably and formed curious mixtures, we see the Hottentots, Griquas, Namaquas and Korannas, a type formed by the average negro blended with the primitive "earth diggers" or Bushmen, when the Bushmen were not so few or so much despised as they are to-day. This breed is not so tall as the negro of the central regions, nor so dwarfish as the Bushmen. They have the clayey complexion and high cheek bones of the latter, as well as their tufted hair, but the muscular development and build of the true negro.

As regards North Africa, it is unnecessary to go into details respecting the Berber stock, which is the ancient "Barberi" of the Romans. The basic stock was, no doubt, that which peopled Egypt in the pre-historic age; but as its area was much larger, and as it formed itself into several independent tribes and nations, it was more exposed to the influence of the many European and Asiatic nations which in the course of time formed colonies, of which Dido's colony is an example. Among them, Greeks, Phœnicians, Goths, Gauls, Romans, Celtiberians, Arabs, Jews, French and Spaniards have left their traces freely on the mass of the peoples now found there, while the negro blood has not been wanting to give color and picturesqueness to their physiognomies.

Darwin says in his "Descent of Man:" "Although the existing races of men differ in many respects, as in color, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, etc., yet, if their whole organization be taken into consideration, they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points."

No traveller who has penetrated Africa, with an open mind, can refrain from agreeing with this. I have endeavored to show the effects on the Africans of more than 7,000 years of in-breeding, to which they were compelled by their peculiar environments, and the rigid natural and artificial barriers raised against them, by which the original type of African has been perpetuated by repetition. When this fact first dawns on the traveller, he is moved by an emotion as great as that which affects him when gazing on the mummy of Sesostris after it lay entombed for thirtythree centuries. He has viewed the physiognomies of his own prehistoric ancestors, who occupied Asia hundreds of centuries before Menes and Ninus existed; and if he has been led by his thought to trace the fortunes of those pre-historic dark men, conquerors of the African, who elected to wander through Asia and Europe, he will begin to realize what his own cave-dwelling ancestry, who. were contemporaries of the mammoth and the lion, were like.

There is no need to seek for traces of a submerged continent to locate the home of the first woolly-haired negro, or the clay-colored Bushmen and darker pigmy. Asia is of sufficient amplitude, provided we allow time enough and take into consideration its varieties of climate, for the strange divergences in the human races to have taken place within it. The continent that exhibits the almondeyed Mongolian, the blue-eyed Circassian, the deep, black Gondas and Bhillas, the dark Paharias, the dwarfish Aeta, the hook-nosed Jew, and the short-nosed Tartar, could surely, in the very earliest ages of man, have produced such contrasts as the woolly-haired negro, and the silken-haired Aryan. But in all my travels I have seen nothing more wonderful than this, that, in whatever disguise I have found man, something in him seems to justify the belief that "we are all the children of one Father."

HENRY M. STANLEY.