what is called the "Great South African Race." They are a vast family of nations, speaking dialects of the same language, furnishing incontrovertible evidence, so says Pritchard, of "a common origin."

There is one fact, in reference to them, of absorbing interest; it is that among these nations, and sometimes among the same tribe, are found specimens of the lowest Negro type, and specimens of the same type elevated and transfigured so as to approximate far towards the European form and features. Between these two there is every possible variety, and the variations depend much on moral condition and physical surroundings. Along the coast humanity generally sinks down into its lowest shapes, and puts on its most disgusting visage.

Rising into the interior, and climbing the tablelands, the evidence of decided improvement generally appears. Perhaps the most savage of these tribes is to be found on the coast of Congo. They are cannibals of great ferocity and brutality. But on the castern coast are found a people called Kafirs, some tribes occupying the coast, and a few the mountain plains. Some of these tribes, "whose fine forms and easy attitudes remind the traveller of ancient statues," inhabit large towns and cities, have made great progress in the arts of industry, cultivate vast fields of sugar and tobacco, manufacture various kinds of cutlery, and "build their houses with masonry, and ornament them with pillars and mouldings.

They exhibit fine traits of intellectual and moral character. Mixed up with their superstitions, they have some lofty, religious ideas; believe in the immortality of the soul, in a Supreme Being, whom they call

"The Beautiful," who exercises a providence over mankind. Such are the nations of Central and Southern Africa; and if we can rely on the reports of the best travellers, they furnish some of the best material, out of which to build up prosperous states and empires, that is to be found on the face of the earth.

We come next to the Hottentots, including the Bushmen, who belong to the same race. In the scale of humanity, he probably sinks below the inhabitants of Guinea or Congo.

The Hottentot has long furnished a standard of comparison to moral writers by which to represent the lowest condition of man. He inhabits the desert, lives in caves, subsists on roots or raw flesh, has no religious ideas, and is considered by the European as too wretched a being to be converted into a slave. How came he thus degraded?

That is a question which we do not often see answered, and which must be answered, to the shame of Christian Europe. Before that evil hour when the Christian navigator neared the Cape of Good Hope, the Hottentots were a numerous people, divided into many tribes under a patriarchal government of chiefs and elders.

They had numerous flocks and herds, lived in movable villages, were bold in the chase, courageous in warfare, yet mild in their tempers and dispositions; had rude conceptions of religion, and exhibited a scene of pastoral life like that of the ancient Nomads of the Syrian plains. In a word, they were a part of that stream of emigration to which we have referred in a previous chapter, and who evidently were

living somewhat as they had in the country of their ancestors.

Kolben, who saw the Hottentots in the day of their prosperity, enumerates eighteen tribes of the race. The European colonists hunted these tribes as they would hunt beasts of prey. Most of them they exterminated, and seized upon their possessions; the rest they robbed and drove into forests and deserts, where their miserable descendants exist as wandering Bushmen, exhibiting to good Christian people material for most edifying studies in "anatomy and ethnology.'

There is an immense region, comprising the greater part of interior Africa, two thousand miles in length, and one thousand in breadth, nearly equal to the whole of the United States, which has seldom been trodden by the foot of the Caucasian. It spreads out beneath the tropics, and is supposed by Humboldt to be one of the most interesting and fertile regions on the face of the earth.

"It must be," he says, "a high table-land, rising into the cooler strata of the atmosphere, combining therefore the qualities of the tierra caliente of Mexico, with its 'cloudless ethers,' the luxuriant slopes of the Andes, and the pastoral plains of Southern Asia. It cannot be a sandy desert, though sometimes put down as such upon the maps, because vast rivers come rolling down from it into the surrounding seas."

It has long been the land of romance, mystery, and wonder, and of strange and tantalizing rumors. The "blameless Ethiopians" of Homer, the favorites of the gods, and the wonderful Macrobians of Herodotus, are placed by Heeren on the outskirts of this region, where they would be most likely to be offshoots from its

parent stock. This country is guarded from the European by forces more potent than standing armies.

Around it stretches a border on which brood malaria, pestilence, and death, and which the English government for half a century have expended lives and treasure to break through. In one expedition after another sent out from the island of Ascension, nine white men out of ten fell victims to the "beautiful, but awful climate."

Nevertheless, news from the interior more or less distinct has found its way over this belt of danger and death. Being a land of mystery, it should be borne in mind that there is a strong tendency to exaggeration in all that comes from it. The Niger, one of the noblest of rivers, skirts this unknown country for some hundreds of miles, after sweeping away through the middle portion of Central Africa already described.

The Colonial Magazine," speaking of the exploration of this river by the English expeditions, says: "They have found that this whole tract of country is one of amazing fertility and beauty, abounding in gold, ivory, and all sorts of tropical vegetation. There are hundreds of woods, invaluable for dyeing and agricultural purposes, not found in other portions of the world.

"Through it for hundreds of miles sweeps a river from three to six miles broad, with clean water and unsurpassable depth, flowing on at the rate of two or three miles an hour, without rock, shoal, or snag to intercept its navigation. Other rivers pour into this tributary waters of such volume as must have required hundreds of miles to be collected, yet they seem scarcely to enlarge it. Upon this river are scattered

cities, some of which are estimated to contain a million of inhabitants; and the whole country teems with a dense population. Far in the interior, in the very heart of this continent, is a portion of the African race in an advanced state of civilization.”

In the year 1816, Captain Tuckey, of the English Navy, made a disastrous expedition up the Congo. In 1828, Mr. Owen, from the opposite coast, attempted to penetrate this land of mystery and marvel, with a like result. But they found a manifest improvement in the condition of the people the farther they advanced, and they met with rumors of a powerful and civilized nation still farther inward, whose country they attempted in vain to explore.

In 1818, John Campbell, agent of the London Missionary Society, tried to reach this country by journeying from the Cape northward; and later still, Captain Alexander led an expedition, having the same object in view. They found large and populous cities situated in a fertile and highly-cultivated country, but they did not reach the land of marvel and mystery, though they heard the same rumors respecting its people. A writer in the Westminster Review," who lived several years on the western coast, gives an interesting description of the interior of the country. He says:

"A state of civilization exists among some of the tribes, such as had not been suspected hitherto by those who have judged only from such accounts as have been given of the tribes with which travellers have come in contact. They cannot be regarded as savages, having organized townships, fixed habitations, with regular defences about their cities, engaging in agriculture and the manufacture of cotton cloths for