tions which have visited and occupied one after the other the different archipelagoes of the Pacific. Amidst the Malayo-Polynesian world subsist the remains of the Negritos and of the Australians, and the compact mass of the Papuans or eastern Negroes. The little known languages of these peoples hardly lend themselves to comparative study. The details we possess upon the literary culture of the Malays and Polynesians, unhappily arrested in their original development by Islam and by Christianity, show us specimens of humanity which range from the acceptable to the charming

CHAPTER V.

AFRICAN RACES AND LANGUAGES.

The past of Africa-Distribution of races-Linguistic map of Africa— General characteristics of the African languages-Idioms of the Bosjesmans and Hottentots-The clacking sounds or klicks-Kaffir or Bantu family-Prefixing of the syllables which denote case or person-Phonetic peculiarities of the dialects—Ukuhlonipa—Transition from the proper to the figurative sense-Bornu group: Haoussa-Senegambian group: Mandingue, Eiwe, Wolof-Peul or Poul-Upper Nile group: Dinka, Nouba, or Kensi-Gallaic group-The Berber languages-Coptic and Ancient Egyptian.

WE found a certain pleasure in reducing to a single family the various Malay and Polynesian idioms, and in showing by examples, drawn from the annals and imaginative poetry of these peoples, what good use had been made of these simple and sweet-sounding languages by the different races, often well gifted, which speak them.

Our study of Africa will not, I fear, offer us the same kind of interest; for, with the exception of the Mediterranean region, Lower Egypt and Barbary, nowhere in Africa has man risen to the intellectual level attained by the Malay or the Polynesian; and in this great mass, which covers more than twenty-two millions of square miles, numerous groups of savage languages form what at the first glance is a hopeless chaos. light of history upon this

We need to throw the

confusion of races and

tongues; but history is arrested at the desert of Two-thirds of the immense continent remain

Sahara.

buried in an obscurity which is scarcely diminished by the vague reports of rare Carthaginian merchants transmitted to us by Herodotus and Diodorus, nor by the somewhat legendary accounts of Arab merchants about the country of the Zendj, doubtless Zanzibar and the Somali coast. For generations the boldest and most fortunate travellers hardly explored anything but the coasts; and the great discoveries which have been made in the last thirty years have brought to light no documents, no monuments of an historic character. Thus, the past of Africa (which is at least as ancient as the rest of the world) is hidden not only from the civilised nations of Europe, but also from the millions of savages who swarm and vegetate on a soil which is nevertheless full of wealth and resource. These tribes, even the most advanced among them, were arrested so early in their development that they have not yet arrived at that point at which a people, either by writing or by some material sign, fixes the memory of its vicissitudes, and finds in the consciousness of its previous inferiority the desire and capacity for progress.

The African negro is certainly capable of improvement, but not of his own initiative or in his own country. His memory is short, his foresight almost nil. Present enjoyment suffices him, poverty or death affect him little. His morality results from his immediate interest, especially from fear of his master. He is animal in the spontaneity of his instincts. Many of them are by nature gentle and indolent, but deceitful, and too often ferocious at times. Many of them laugh easily, but they bite as readily when hunger urges them. It is impossible to rely upon their promises and their most solemn oaths. There are among them brave soldiers, clever hunters, here

and there intermittent cultivators of the soil (who, however, leave all the work to the women), travelling smiths; lastly, and especially in the valley of the Niger, artisans, potters, weavers, tanners, enough to satisfy the limited wants of half-naked populations; but, generally speaking, from the Guinea Coast to the great lakes in which the Nile takes its rise, and from Bornu to the Orange River, these tribes stagnate in immemorial savagery. The most ingenious of the Zulu tales are very poor stuff, and so is the mythology of the Dahomeyans. One is inclined to prefer to these laborious and futile inventions the hungry naïveté of the Hottentot, who considers the sun as a piece of lard which has unfortunately been hung out of reach.

The first impression caused by the narrow foreheads above the protruding jaw and thick lips, by the sooty bodies anointed with every species of evil-smelling grease, is uniformly unpleasant, but it is easy to perceive marked differences in conformation, stature, colour, physiognomy, among these tribes who live side by side, in a singular confusion, and generally without other frontier than the palisade or mound of earth which surrounds their village. It is easy to understand that there are intruders, conquerors, who are either absolute, or the suzerains of subjects whose condition varies between servitude and vassalage. We try to follow up the path taken by the invaders, and the geographical distribution of the victors and vanquished, and especially the amount of mixture between them (which is a measure of the length of time during which forced relations have existed between the indigenous race and the later comers), will supplement to some extent the missing historical data.

We thus are enabled to see, in a very remote age,

A

the north of Africa, perhaps then joined to the Canaries and to Spain, inhabited on its borders by a white race, the Lybians or Berbers, whose domain extends to the delta of the Nile on the one hand, where they march with tribes, also white probably, of Asiatic origin, Khamites and Semites, and higher up the great river they encounter a black, smooth-haired race, the Noubas and Barabras. While the mixture of these three races forms the Egyptian nation, whose colour varies from reddish-brown to a yellowish- white, the western Lybians, rounding and crossing the Sahara, find themselves in presence of true Negroes with woolly hair, the Yolofs and others, who occupy the basins of the Senegal, the Niger, and the Ogooue, and whose dense masses are not much tinged with Berber blood.

On the extreme east another white stream, issuing from the point of Arabia, takes the Noubas, already driven back by the progress of the Egyptian people, in flank, and leaves upon the coast, and in the highlands of Abyssinia, the Gallas, the Somalis, the Ethiopians, all mixed with native blood in varying proportions. This east central invasion has had two important consequences it drove towards the west, by slow degrees, to the south of the Sahara, towards the basin of Lake Tchad, and towards Guinea, a part of the Nouba population, already somewhat tinged with Lybian and Asiatic blood, and already somewhat awakened by contact with superior races. These Noubas are the Peuls or Pouls, studied by Faidherbe, who, scattered over Senegambia and Guinea, and further mixed with the Lybians of the south and with the Berbers of the desert, constitute the dominant class or caste of the Niger country.

On the other hand, the pressure of the Nubian

!gypt