-^ Anthropology : Historical 



mines of those regions from an early period. When over- 

 population, civil wars, the necessity for emigration forced 

 sections of people to leave the plateaux and wander in search 

 of a new home, they were attracted by stories which reached 

 them, through predecessors, of the great salt water that lay 

 beyond the forest, the water which on drying or evaporating 

 left behind it that precious condiment, salt, which had become 

 of supreme necessity to man. Some of the tribes had learnt 

 (as in East Africa) how to make salt from potash, by burning 

 reeds and extracting salt from the lye. But this was a pro- 

 cedure not easily effected out of the open country, in the dense 

 forest. Those people who stayed in the forest from choice 

 or necessity were forced to keep up some kind of commerce 

 with the people on the sea-coast, or the people to the north 

 on the open plateau, in order to get supplies of salt. Whether 

 or not cannibalism arose from this longing for salt and the 

 satisfaction which was derived from the salt-tasting blood of 

 man, is an undecided point. Cannibalism must have arisen as 

 a purely human practice, because amongst the apes and monkeys 

 that are known to us there is jiot a trace of such a practice, 

 rather a horror of it, even though some apes, baboons, and 

 monkeys are slightly carnivorous. 



Islam must have penetrated through Liberia to the coast 

 in what is now called the Vai country before, or at least 

 simultaneously with, the arrival of the first Europeans. A 

 certain degree of Muhammadan civilisation, and the use of 

 clothing specially connected with that civilisation, is noted 

 amongst the Vai people, at any rate as far back as the sixteenth 

 century. 



Long prior to this, however, the civilisation of the north 

 had brought to the Negroes of Liberia modifications of their 

 purely savage life. No doubt two thousand years ago they 



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