CHAP. XVII INTERMIXTURE OF RACES 319 



cannot become nomadic. Some of them are physically and 

 mentally incompetent for the strain of such a life, and must be 

 content with servitude or else submit to the ever-recurring raids 

 of the more powerful tribes. The physical conditions of the 

 country, therefore, help to divide the people into two classes : 

 one consists of warlike conquering nomads ; the other of feebler 

 races, who either eke out a precarious existence on mountain 

 summits, in forest clearings, and on islands in the vast malarial 

 swamp, or else live as serfs and helots in subjection to the 

 dominant tribes. 



If this were all that had happened owing to the migrations 

 of African tribes, — if the conquerors had exterminated all the 

 conquered, if the new possessors had kept apart from the dis- 

 possessed, — the race characters might still have been preserved 

 fairly pure. But this has not occurred. The bands of invaders 

 probably contained a majority of men, while owing to polygamy 

 an excess of women was required. The men therefore had to take 

 to themselves wives from the people of the land in which they 

 settled ; hence mongrel races occur wherever such national 

 movements have taken place, and abound from one end of 

 the continent to the other. The Hottentots, for example, 

 are now regarded as hybrid between the Bushmen and Bantu, 

 instead of belonging to a distinct race, differing from either. 

 The Suahili in the same way have resulted from the inter- 

 marriage of Arab and Negro. The whole of the great group 

 of the Fulah is probably a product of the blending of Hamitic 

 and Negro tribes. It is this miscegenation which has introduced 

 uncertainty into the classification of the African races. There is 

 no trouble in determining the affinities of the Bantu Zulu, the 

 Semitic Abyssinian, the Hamitic Somali, or the aboriginal 

 Bushman ; but to estimate the systematic value, and to discover 

 the relationships of hybrid tribes, which have merged the 

 physique of two races, and perhaps adopted the language of a 

 third, is so difficult that many ethnographers have abandoned 

 the effort in despair. 



Moreover, not only are the physical features of the people 

 confused by intermarriages resulting from nomad life, tribal war, 

 concubinage, and polygamy, but the language test has also 

 been rendered unreliable, owing to the extent to which some 

 tribes have adopted words and inflexions, or even the whole 



