1895. SOME NEW BOOKS. 135 



as Zanzibar. The people present differences no less striking : for 

 the continent is the home of the dwarfs, the Herculean Monbutti 

 and the tall, slim Somali ; of the fair Berbers, the black Soudanese, 

 the chocolate Bushmen, and the coppery Suahili. The languages 

 may be uniform over vast areas like the Bantu, or may be a 

 complex of very different groups, as in the negro tribes of the Nubar 

 Fular group. Africa is so often represented as a land of dull unifor- 

 mity that the contrast worked out by the author is novel and 

 suggestive. No doubt every other continent yields similar contrasts, 

 geographical, climatic, and ethnological, and these are probably even 

 more extensive and striking. Ir spite of Professor Keane's ingenuity 

 and the amount of truth unquestionably contained in his contrast, 

 one feels bound to admit, that when compared with its size and 

 opportunities, the old view is on the whole the true one. 



North Africa is divided into six districts which are described, 

 separately. These are the region of the Atlas (including Tunis, 

 Algiers, and Morocco), Tripolitana, the Sahara, the Soudan and the 

 Niger Basin, Egypt and Nubia, and Italian North-East Africa, 

 including Abyssinia and Somaliland. Each of these is described 

 separately, accounts being given of the physical features, ethnography, 

 climate and political customs. Politics occupy a leading place, and 

 as a rule are very fairly treated. The author states that the success 

 of the French in Algeria " goes far to gainsay the trite remark that 

 they [the French] do not know how to colonise." He points out, 

 however, that the French have lost ^151,000,000 in their fifty-eight 

 years of occupation, and that the claim that there is now an annual 

 surplus in the Budget is due to the fact that the military charges for 

 the army of 7,000 men are not included. The author does fair justice 

 to the abused Portuguese, and refers to their early explorations. 

 This is the more satisfactory, as one of the faults in the book is that in 

 the references to literature, foreign work does not receive its proper 

 share of notice. Thus, Fischer, on p. 16, is mentioned only casually, 

 and the credit due to the first traverse of the Masai country is awarded 

 to another. The most valuable part of the work is that dealing with 

 the ethnology — this is well up to date. The recent discussion as to 

 the presence of dwarfs in Morocco is referred to, and the classification 

 of the tribes includes the results of most recent investigations. The 

 general natural history is less satisfactory. Casuarinas are said, on 

 p. 468, to grow on the banks of the Webi-Shebeyli, which is almost 

 impossible. The author sometimes trusts for his geology to scattered 

 notes in anthropological journals (as on p. 553), with results that are 

 not very encouraging. He tells us that the Nilotic lands have not been 

 below sea level since pre-Tertiary times, which is a statement that 

 requires serious modification. In one place the conclusions are a 

 little previous ; as when we are told on p. 246, that the French have 

 overthrown their enemy Samory, a statement which the news of the 

 past three months has shown to be very far from the truth. 



The geographical sketches are clear surveys of the physical 

 features. Many popular misconceptions are corrected, such as that 

 the Nile has its largest volume below Berber, instead of at its mouth, 

 a frequently repeated statement due to the fact that the river receives 

 no tributaries after this point ; but this ignores the supplies added by 

 springs upon its bed. The " flooding of the Nile" is also explained 

 as a case of percolation of water through the soil, instead of by flow 

 across the surface as is usually supposed. The ludicrous absurdity 

 of the proposal to flood the Sahara by letting in the waters of the 

 Atlantic is held up to ridicule, and the very limited areas which could 



