260 BOTANICAL EXCURSIONS 
well suited for the frontier service. The officers are English, 
the men partly of mixed breed and partly genuine Hotten- 
tots. These latter people, of whom I saw a considerable 
number in Graham's Town and its neighbourhood, have 4 
most peculiar and repulsive physiognomy. The form of the 
face is singularly angular, owing to the excessive projection 
of the cheek-bones, the shrunk and pinched appearance of 
the lower part of the cheeks, and the sharpness of the chin; 
the mouth is prominent and the lips thick; the eyes very 
small and narrow, and rather obliquely placed ; the forehead 
depressed; the nose flattened in a remarkable degree, so 
that the upper part of it appears to be quite obliterated, 
while the nostrils are large and wide. The colour is a light 
and slightly yellowish brown, very like that of a dead oak- 
leaf. The plates in Le Vaillant's Travels do not at all exag- 
gerate the usual ugliness of this strange race; but whether 
his account of their moral character is correct, I cannot tell. 
I never saw any of them in their original state of wild inde- 
pendence, and if they ever were such as he describes them; 
they have sadly deteriorated by the contact of civilized 
man. 
The Hottentots are mostly of small stature; the majority 
of those in the Cape corps, at least of the new levies, are 
under five feet high, and they are possessed of very little 
muscular strength. Their hands and feet are small and 
delicate, in which particular they differ very remarkably from 
the negroes. 
The number of genuine Hottentots within the colony at the 
present day, is small compared with that of the mixed breeds; 
or Bastaards as they are called, in whom the blood of the abo- 
riginal race is crossed with that of the Dutch, the negro, 9" 
the Malay. The Bastaards are much superior in size and 
strength to the Hottentot race. 
