THE ROMANCE OF RAGE. 519 



whicli we know to have taken place during tlie liistorical period 

 also took place in prehistoric times and in unhistoric countries. Just 

 as the English now colonize the coasts of the world, from Australia, 

 Tasmania, and New Zealand, to South Africa, Canada, British 

 Columbia, and Demerara, so the PhoBnician and the Malay colonized 

 in earlier times the Mediten'anean or the Indian Ocean, and so the 

 Melanesian in a very remote past spread across the Pacific in the 

 frailest of vessels. And just as the Goth and Hun and Tartar 

 swept down in historic times on the Roman Empire or the Asiatic 

 world, so, long before, unknown migrations and unnamed hordes 

 of savages swept down upon Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. Eor 

 the historic periods and places, we have documentary evidence; for 

 the prehistoric or unhistoric, we have but the evidence of the existing 

 and resultant arrangements. 



Even these, however, tell us a great deal. What, for example, 

 can be more curious than the existing diffusion of that tiny black 

 " IsTegrito " race, with woolly hair and very protruding jaws, which 

 is now in all probability the earliest surviving variety of the human 

 species? These pygmies occur in Africa as the dwarfs of the forest 

 country, the Akkas, "VVochuas, and others, barely four feet high; 

 as the Batwas and Bushmen of the south; and less pure, as the Hot- 

 tentots. They crop up again in the undersized aborigines of the 

 Andaman Islands of the Gulf of Bengal, in the Negritos of the 

 Philippines, and in the small black Papuans. Hence we are justified 

 in concluding that this widespread half-developed race of dwarfs 

 once covered a large part of the southern world, from which it has 

 now been ousted by newer, bigger, and more developed tribes; while 

 the primitive pygmies hold their own best either in a few remote 

 islands, in a few barren deserts, or else in very dense and pathless 

 forests, through which taller races would creep with difficulty. 



Not less interesting than these romances of race as race are 

 the romances of the interaction of race and religion, or of race and 

 culture. For example, the Moors of the towns and of the seacoast 

 in North Africa, largely intermixed as they are with Arab and other 

 Semitic blood, have swallowed Islam entire, adopting not only its 

 religion but also its social order — its polygamy, its harems, its veil- 

 ing of women. The Kabyles and Berbers of the hills, on the other 

 hand, fairly pure descendants of the old native Mauritanian or 

 Romanized inhabitants, though they have accepted Mohammedanism 

 more or less fervently as a religious faith, have never really assimi- 

 lated it as a social system. To this day they are practically strict 

 monogamists; their women do not veil, but freely show their ex- 

 tremely pretty and piquant faces; while the family is organized on 

 much the same basis as in Europe generally. In other words, the 



