652 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ceals : every one takes of its treasures wherever he finds them. All, 

 from all directions, fetch iron and copper ores from those parts of the 

 land where the mines have been known to exist from time imme- 

 morial ; and the people who ordinarily live near the mines have never 

 on that account thought of assuming any right of proprietorship over 

 them. There are but few salt-licks in the land ; and, as soon after the 

 rainy season as the ground becomes passable, the herders from all 

 quarters drive their cattle across the pasture-lands indifferently to the 

 springs. The dwellers around these places look on quietly, while the 

 cattle and the sheep, flocking up by thousands from all the regions 

 around, tread down and destroy the grass of their pastures. They 

 may complain to themselves about the destruction, but it never occurs 

 to them to drive the strangers away. It would be decidedly foreign 

 to the Damara mind for any one to undertake, as Europeans are accus- 

 tomed to do, to monopolize the salt-springs and charge a higher price 

 for the use of them as they become more indispensable to others. 



The Hereros will even resist, in every way, any one conceding, by 

 sale, a particular right to any person to hold any piece of land. The 

 Roman Catholic missionaries, who recently sought to gain a footing 

 in Damaraland, made themselves suspected more than in any other way 

 by representing to the people that they would do better by them than 

 the Protestant missionaries had done, for they would buy land for their 

 churches, schools, and dwellings, while the Protestant missionaries 

 were occupying land for those purposes free. They ruined their cause, 

 and prompted the heathen chief to try every device to get them away. 

 In a similar manner, the chiefs told us German missionaries, whenever 

 the subject came up, " You may live in our country as long as you 

 wish, and no one shall molest you so long as the land belongs to us, 

 but we will not sell a bit of it to any man." 



There are not even any real boundaries between the different tribes. 

 Some of the chiefs have, indeed, set up exclusive claims to particular 

 tracts, but have never assumed to enforce them ; and other tribes have 

 never been required to leave the land. The natural result of this com- 

 munism is, that no one has a personal care for the land, but gets all he 

 can out of it, and then leaves it waste to go to a new spot. Hence 

 the language of the Hereros has no terms for home, fatherland, or 

 boundary-lines. 



This communism extends to all the productions of the earth that 

 have not been separated from it. Whatever a man has put his hand 

 upon, that becomes his private property. Whoever takes from a man 

 anything that he has appropriated to his own use, is a thief. Game, 

 free in the fields, belongs to whoever can kill it ; but to take it away 

 from a hunter who has bagged it is a theft, or robbery. In Damara 

 law even game which has only been hit, and has afterward been killed 

 by some one else, belongs to the hunter who first hit it, although he is 

 expected to give a share of it to the other one. This feeling is so 



