Section F. 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



NOTES ON 80ME OF THE EAULIER CONTRIBUTORS TO 

 ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORK IN SOUTH AFRICA. 



By W. Hammond Tookk. 



It has l)een a convenient practice in vogue in the society whicli tlie 

 South African Association for the Advancement of Science naturally 

 regards as its parent association for each president of a section, upon a 

 convenient occasion, to review the }>rogress of his particular science in 

 a brief biographical resume of the career of those scientists who have 

 preceded hint in his sphere of work during the twenty, or say fifty, 

 years which may have been completed at the date of his address, or 

 since the association last assembled in the city whose hospitality it is 

 for the time enjoying. 



In an association like our own, which is still in its infancy, such a 

 course is not possible ; but it may perhaps be permitted in the sixt)i of 

 its annual meetings, and the first in which ethnology and kiiidred 

 sciences have a sectional president of their own, if he flrafte, however 

 imperfectly, an introductory chapter to future addresses of this (^lescrip- 

 tion, which it may be hoped will be delivered by savants far better 

 qualified for their task than he. It is the object, therefore, of this 

 short paper to recall in brief a few of the flistinguished names of th«>se 

 who in the past have contributed to our knowledge of the native races 

 of South Africa. 



B3' th(> term the "Native Races of South Africa" we propose 

 to confine ourselves to the Bantu-speaking negroids and the yell(/W- 

 skinned races now or in historic times dwelling south of the Zambesi 

 and Cunene. It is true that traces e.xist of a primitive race which 

 once peopled more or less densely our subcontinent, but they have only 

 lately received notice, or one might say been discovered. On the other 

 hand, we find students of the ethnology of the Bantu, the Hottentot 

 and the Bushman living long ago in times far remote from ours, and 

 an inquiry into their labours, if exhaustively undertaken, would lead us 

 back to the earliest records of our civilisation. 



Under the name of Zeng, the progenitors of the eastern branch of 

 the Bantu-speaking races now south of the Zambesi were in the tenth 

 century still located north of that I'iver in the country round Zanzibar. 

 Of the descriptions by the early Moslem geographers, that given by Al 

 Mas'udv in his Golden Meadotvs is the one that deserves most attention. 

 It is not clear whether Ibn Haukal actually visited East Africa, but he 

 found that familiarity with the western blacks bred contempt, and he 

 declined discussing people loving neither wisflom, religion nor justice, 

 nor enjoying a regular government. Abu Ze3"d Hassan and " Suleiman 



