1005.] on Native Races of the British East Africa Protectorate. 115 



are not primitive, and do not represent the earliest efforts of incipient 

 speech, but are rather corruptions and degradations of more elaborate 

 idioms. If, for example, a savage language is found to possess no 

 numerals beyond two or three, it seems to me probable that this is not 

 a primitive attempt to count, but rather that people who could not 

 count at all have tried to copy the systems of numeration used by 

 more advanced races, and have succeeded only to a very limited 

 extent. I would not deny that language viewed historically shows a 

 process of development, but we have absolutely no information 

 respecting the historically earliest forms of speech, nor is it likely we 

 shall ever have any, for they must have flourished ages before the use 

 of writing. But the nearest parallels which we can find, those of 

 writing and literature, make it probable that the growth of language 

 has been far more iiTegular and spasmodic than is generally recognised, 

 and that it was not developed with even approximate uniformity all 

 over the world. In the case of writing, practically all alphabets are 

 traceable to one, or at the most to two sources, whence the art has 

 spread over the whole world ; and people like the ancient Hindus, 

 though they perhaps attained a higher intellectual level than the 

 Egyptians and Assyrians, never invented a system of writing of their 

 own. In the case of literature, the production of great works has 

 generally l)een extremely capricious and confined to short spaces of 

 time, such as the Augustan and Elizabethan periods. I can hence 

 imagine that the development of language has been equally capricious 

 — or perhaps we should say inscrutable — in regard to both place and 

 time ; that in special localities and special eras new types of language 

 have been suddenly created, which were more perfect and more quickly 

 matm-e than we are apt to think probable. These languages would 

 be adopted by inferior races, but inevitably be corrupted and degraded 

 because the finer parts of their mechanism would not be understood ; 

 and this I believe to be the explanation of a great many idioms spoken 

 at present by uncivilised tribes. It is possible, though it would be 

 difficult to demonstrate, that some of these dwarfish African tribes 

 have never had a language of their own, and only have possessed the 

 gift of speech in so far as they l)orrowed it from their neighl)Ours. 



Whether the pygmies are really the aborigines of Africa and a 

 type of primitive man is too large a question for discussion here. 

 The analogy of extinct animals gives no ground for imagining that 

 the ancestors of the human race were smaller than their descendants, 

 and I would rather suppose that the pygmies represent a very early 

 but feeble race of mankind, who have always been prone to seek 

 shelter and protection from the attacks of their stronger brethren, and 

 found it most effectually in the forests of central Africa. 



But my immediate purpose is rather to point out how in East 

 Africa this substratum of Bantu-speaking people, much mixed no 

 doubt and containing many physical types, but still united by a 

 certain similarity of customs as well as of language, has been invaded 



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