CHAP. XVI 1 DWARFS AND BUSHMEN 232, 



the discovery of clicks in the language of some of the tribes.^ No 

 doubt the colonies have long been isolated, and have been forced 

 to live in situations where the conditions of life are unfavourable ; 

 thus considerable differences between the various tribes have been 

 developed. Nevertheless the several descriptions agree in three 

 points. First ^ — the people are small in stature, the measurements 

 that can be relied on giving them a height of from 3^ to 5 

 feet. Second — they are lighter in colour, being described either 

 as olive brown, yellowish brown, or chocolate-coloured. Third — their 

 habits and mode of life are of extreme simplicity. Reports that go 

 into greater detail, moreover, show that the dwarf races have large 

 rounded heads, are prognathous {i.e. have protruding jaws), and have 

 short legs. 



It is accordingly claimed by some ethnologists that the equatorial 

 dwarfs agree with the Bushmen of Cape Colony in physical features, 

 colour, sounds, and mental characteristics, and therefore belong to the 

 same race group. The earliest writers on the subject attributed the 

 origin of these light-coloured, primitive Bushmen to a settlement of a 

 colony from over the sea. This is improbable, for whatever the Bushmen 

 are, they are not sailors. It is far more likely that they entered Cape 

 Colony by a migration from the north, for there is historical evidence to 

 prove that they (and their half-breed allies, the Hottentots) once lived 

 much farther toward the north than they do at present. Now they are 

 limited to the south of a line leaving the western coast in latitude 22° 

 S., which runs northward to the Zambesi valley in lat. 17° S. long. 20° 

 E., and then turns southward, and passing Lake Ngami and through 

 Bechuanaland, reaches the eastern coast near Port Elizabeth. In the 

 eighteenth century, however, both they and the Hottentots were met 

 with much farther to the north, as in 1767 a Dutch ship under 

 " Corporal Thomas Hobma " found them all along the west coast up 

 to 12" 47'.- Philology affords further evidence of this fact. Thus the 

 Bapedi call the country to the west of them " Boroa," which means the 

 " country of the Bushmen," though at present the district is inhabited 

 by Bantu people.^ Fritsch,* in fact, in his great monograph on the 

 South African races, concludes that the Bushmen once extended 

 throughout South Africa up to the Zambesi, and perhaps beyond it. 

 Beke would carry them farther, for he compared the drawings with 

 which they ornamented their rock shelters to the hieroglyphs of tlie 

 Egyptians, and placed them among the Hamites as relatives of the 

 Copts. Others, on no better grounds, made them close allies of the 

 Semitic Phoenicians, or even of the Jews. The drawings of the Bush- 



1 For example, the tribe reported by Serpo Tinto from the region between the 

 Kuando and the Kubango, two of the head streams of the Zambesi. 



- A. Merensky, Bcitrdge stir Kemitniss Sud-Afrikas, p. "jj. 



'^ Ratzel, Volkerltunde, Bd. i. (1887), p. 118, and Merensky, op. cit. p. 78. 



■* Gustav Fritsch, Die Eingehormen Snd-Afrikas, Ethnographiscli und A?iaiomisc/i 

 (Breslau, 1872), p. 386. 



