The Stone Ages of South Africa. 199 



extended posteriors are characteristic of the whole Hottentot race ; 

 but in some of the small Bosjemans they are carried to such an 

 extravagant degree as to excite laughter. If the letter S be con- 

 sidered as one expression of the line of beauty to which degrees of 

 approximation are admissible, some of the women of this nation are 

 entitled to the first rank in point of form. A section of the body 

 from the breast to the knee forms really the shape of the above 

 letter. The projection of the posterior part in one subject measures 

 five inches and a half from the line touching the spine. This pro- 

 tuberance consisted entirely of fat, and when the women walked it 

 exhibited the most ridiculous appearance imaginable, every step 

 being accompanied with a quivering and tremulous motion, as if two 

 masses of jelly had been attached behind her." 



I refer the reader to PL XXVIII. The four Figs, on this Plate 

 reproduce absolutely, even in measurements, the description of 

 Barrow. These models, which are casts taken on the living sub- 

 ject and therefore true in every detail, form part of a collection 

 of nineteen which I have reasons to believe are relatively pure 

 bred." 



This steatopygia is a physical character of great importance. It 

 is not only encountered in the clay statuettes of prehistoric Egypt, 

 but all the aurignacian or pre-solutrean figures of women discovered 

 hitherto, whether carved out of ivory, stone, or horn, show it also 

 in a very strongly developed form. Nor is it in archaic time only 

 that this style of figuration, evidently reproduced from nature, pre- 

 vailed. Statuettes exhibiting this development, but from sites which 

 are accepted as neolithic, are known from the grottoes or caves of 

 France and of Egypt ; they have been met with in Malta, in Poland, 

 in Eoumania, Greece, Crete, &c. Even now, along the shores of 

 the Mediterranean, the esthetic merit of Venus callijjyge is very 

 much appreciated. 



Impossible as it is to decide if the present steatopygia of the 

 Bush-Hottentot woman is or not a case of survival, she possesses 



* Indignant, indeed, was the woman (Figs. 208, 209), whose steatopygia is not 

 of extreme type, when it was suggested to her that she might be a Hottentot. No ! 

 she was a pure-bred Bush ; and I have no doubt that she believed herself to be so. 

 A brother of hers, however, who was of the same parentage — and a bad character 

 who did not seem to rocognise the difference between meinu and tmnn — was shot 

 dead by another native, to whose goats he was helping himself. The body was 

 secured, but the indices of the skull do not differ from those of the Hottentot. Yet 

 the man was known as, or looked upon by his Hottentot congeners as well as by the 

 Colonists, as a Bushman, a name in which his sister, as well as the other woman 

 who forms the subject of Fig. 211, gloried. 



