The Ethnology and Climatology of Central Africa. 205 
capabilities of high education, although it is a mistake to 
suppose that the average Negro child can be educated up to a 
European standard. Brilliant exceptions to this may be met 
with, but as a rule three generations will be necessary to 
develop the Negro to our standard. Up to the age of fourteen 
the young Negro will probably distance a European child in 
almost any brain work, but after fourteen a marked difference 
becomes apparent, and the hght-skinned Caucasian shoots 
ahead of the dusky child of the tropics. The Negroes possess 
a lethargic constitution, due to those climatological factors to 
which I have referred; nature is so bountiful, that all their 
simple wants are supplied in abundance, without the necessity 
for cultivation of the soil; therefore they have no incentive 
to strenuous manuallabour. Life amongst Negroesis simple ; 
but by careful examination plenty of evidence can be found 
that they possess the rudiments of all the arts which have 
arrived at such perfection in civilised countries. Music, 
painting, dancing, dress—the four great arts—are all met with 
in different stages of development among these primitive 
races, and it is somewhat of a shock to our ideas to find that 
all these arts have one basis,namely, the attraction of the 
sexes.. It is also curious to note that amongst primitive folk 
the idea of dress is more highly developed in man than in 
the woman, and I suppose there is no article worn in the 
west-end drawing-room of the present day which has not its 
prototype in the ornaments worn by savage warriors in 
Central Africa, decked so as to please the eye and charm the 
senses of their more simply attired female admirers. 
In the religion of Negroes, germs of the greatest truths may 
be traced underlying the numerous and strange superstitions, 
and the to us barbarous ceremonies by means of which they 
invoke the aid of their deities. 
The Bantu races resemble in many particulars the Negroes. 
In some respects they are more highly developed; for in- 
stance, their organisation in respect of government and war 
approaches more nearly to that of European systems of the 
sixth and seventh centuries; and by possessing a greater 
richness of language, and a somewhat greater brain capacity, 
they are more easily influenced by new systems either of 
VOL. XI. P 
