474 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



the Berber, especially under the shield of France, becomes more 

 and more aggressive, and yearly increases in numbers. At present 

 he forms at least three- fifths of the population in Algeria, and in 

 Marocco the proportion is greater. He is the race of the future 

 as of the past 1 ." 



This however would seem to apply only to the races, not to 

 their languages, for we are elsewhere told that Arabic is encroach- 

 ing steadily on the somewhat ruder Berber dialects 2 . Considering 

 the enormous space over which they are diffused, and the thou- 

 sands of years that some of the groups have ceased to be in 

 contact, these dialects show remarkably slight divergence from 

 the long extinct proto-Hamitic speech from which all have sprung. 

 Whatever it be called Kabyle, Zenatia, Shawia, Tamashek, 

 Shluh the Berber language is still essentially one, and the 

 likeness between the forms current in Marocco, Algeria, the 

 Sahara, and the remote Siwah Oasis on the confines of Egypt, is 

 much closer, for instance, than between Norse and English in 

 the sub- Aryan Teutonic group 3 . 



But when we cross the conventional frontier between the 

 contiguous Tuareg and Tibu domains in the central 



The Tibus. 



Sahara the divergence is so great that philolo- 

 gists are still doubtful whether the two languages are even re- 

 motely or at all connected. My own impression is that Tibu 

 stands to Berber as Berber to Semitic on the one hand and to 

 Basque on the other all disjecta membra of a primeval mother- 

 tongue, extinct for many thousands of years, and no more or even 

 less capable of reconstruction than the organic Aryan mother- 

 . tongue on which so much unprofitable labour has been lavished. 

 The Tibus themselves, apparently direct descendants of the 

 ancient Garamantes, have their primeval home in the Tibesti 

 range, i.e. the " Rocky Mountains," whence they take their 



1 Les Chaouias etc., in U Anthropologie^ 1897, p. 14. 



p. 17. 



3 The words collected by Sir H. H. Johnston at Dwirat in Tunis show a 

 great resemblance with the language of the Saharan Tuaregs, and the sheikh 

 of that place "admitted that his people could understand and make themselves 

 understood by those fierce nomads, who range between the southern frontier of 

 Algeria and Tunis and the Sudan" (Geogr. Jour., June, 1898, p. 590). 



