NEGRETTI 



h. Id l>\ the Austro-Gerrnann, who 

 b i\en out \>\ the Allie-. HI the 

 following 0<-t. 1'op. 7,000. 

 Negretti , K s KICO ANOKLO Lcoo- 

 (1817-79). Anglo-Italian 

 opticnm. A native of Como, he 

 .-cttlci I in London in 1829, became 

 a glass-Mower, and began business 

 as a maker of thermonu-ters in 1843. 

 Witli his partner, Joseph \\ 

 Am. lint, he gained a high reputa- 

 tion for optical and scientific in- 

 >truments at the great exhibition 

 of ls.~>l, tlms founding a business 

 \\liicli acquired world-wide cde- 

 Krity. An ardent Italian patriot, 

 ti helped the many refugees 

 in Kn^land, and extended hospi- 

 tality to Garibaldi both in his dark 

 days and during the time of his 

 prosperity. He was naturalised 

 in IstiJ. and died at Cricklewood, 

 Sept. 24, 1879. 



Negri, ADA (b. 1870). Italian 

 poet. She was born in humble cir- 

 cumstances at Lodi, Lombardy, 

 Feb. 3, 1870, and having become a 

 teacher, won immediate fame by the 

 publication of a volume of poems, 

 Fatal it a, 1893. After its publica- 

 tion she taught in the normal 

 school at Milan, and was married to 

 a manufacturer named Garlanda. 

 Other volumes of her poems were 

 Tempeste, 1896, and Maternita, 

 1904. In 1917 she published her 

 first volume of prose, Le Solitarie, a 

 collection of short stories of the 

 loneliness of women. See Ada 

 Negri, Carl Henckell, 1896 ; and 

 La Poesie Italienne Contempo- 

 raine, J. Dornis, 1898. 



Negrier, FRANQOIS OSCAR DE 

 (1839-1913). French soldier. Born 

 at Belfort, Oct. 2, 1839, he entered 

 the military college of St. Cyr in 

 1856, and was gazetted lieutenant 

 in 1863. In the Franco-Prussian 

 War he served in the army of Metz. 

 He made his escape and joined 

 Faidherbe in the government of 

 national defence. After the war he 

 served in Algiers, and in 1879 

 became colonel of the foreign legion, 

 which he led in the Oran campaign 

 of 1880. In 1883 he became 

 , general, distinguishing himself in 

 many actions of the Tongking cam- 

 paign, 1884-85. Promoted general 

 of division, in 1894 he was in- 

 spector of the army, retiring in 

 1904. He died Aug. 22, 1913. 



Negrito (Span., little negro). 

 Term denoting diminutive peoples 

 of the black race in S.E. Asia and 

 the equatorial African negrillos. 

 They comprise the pygmy peoples, 

 whose average adult male stature 

 falls l>elow the conventional maxi- 

 mum of 4 ft. 11 ins. 



Once widespread in tropical 

 Asia, the negrito stock survives in 

 four well-marked types: the Aeta 

 of the Philippine islands, who are 



307 1 



the moat numerous ; the Am la 

 maneee of the Bay of Bengal ; the 

 N -Miaiig of the Malay peninsula; 

 and the Tapiro, discovered in 1910 

 in ^iitch New Guinea. Numbering 

 about 25,000 in all, they are 

 dark-skinned, long-arm. <i. with 

 medium or roundish heads, broad 

 noses, prominent eyes, progna- 

 thous jaws, and short, woolly, or 

 frizzy hair. They employ snares 

 and arrows. Their dress, orna- 

 ments, dwellings, social organiza- 

 tion, and animism are on the 

 simplest levels. 



These physical and cultural 

 characters are traceable in Melan- 

 esian and other stocks, such as the 

 Mafulu people of Papua. They 

 appear to point to an age when 

 tropical Asia was in the general 

 occupation of a pygmy negrito 

 stock, before the advent of the 

 primitive wavy-haired, Caucasoid 

 population. Of this pre-Dravidian 

 immigration some surviving ele- 

 ments, such as the Sakai, Toala, 

 and Vedda, approximate in some 

 respects to the negrito culture. 



In tropical Africa the negrillos, 

 whose usual designation in English 

 is the Congo pygmies, include the 

 Akka, Bambute, Batwa, and 



NEORO 



Wo* htia of Belgian Congo ; th 

 Ha bongo of French Equatorial 

 Africa ; and a tribe on the Wute 

 plain in Cameroon*, discovered in 

 1913. The negrillo group is dis- 

 tinguishable from the Asiatic n- 

 gritos by a shorter average stature, 

 falling to 4 ft. 4 in*., thinner lips, 

 and a browner, even yellower, skin. 

 They share with them a tendency 

 to round-headedness, jungle noma- 

 dism, the use of poisoned arrows 

 and snares, and the simplest ele- 

 ments of culture and animistic be- 

 lief. A racial relationship with the 

 Bushmen is no longer held. Some 

 communities which have been en- 

 slaved by taller Bantu -speaking 

 negroids are already, after two 

 generations of settled husbandry, 

 modifying their pygmy traita. 



The view now prevails that both 

 negrito and negrillo are branches 

 of a single tropical stock of Asiatic 

 origin, rather than a parent stem 

 from which the tall, long-headed 

 negro emerged. See Akka; An- 

 damanese ; Dwarf ; Negro ; con- 

 sult also The Pygmies, A. de 

 Quatrefages, Eng. trans. 1895 ; 

 Pygmies and Papuans, A. F. R. 

 Wollaston, 1912 ; Man Past and 

 Present, A. H. Keane, rev. ed. 1920. 



THE NEGRO AND HIS CHARACTERISTICS 



NT. W. Thomas, late Government Anthropologist, S. Nigeria 



In connexion with this article the reader may be referred to the 

 articles Africa; Anthropology ; Ethnology ; Slavery; Slave Trade. 

 See also Bantu ; Fula ; Nilotic : and other races ; also Benin ; 

 Nigeria ; Sudan, and other areas in which negroes live ; Magic, etc. 



Negro (Lat. niger, black) is the 

 name of the dark-skinned, woolly- 

 haired races who inhabit W. Africa 

 S. of the Sahara, and, farther E., 

 the region S. of a line reaching the 

 Indian Ocean near the river Tana. 



Though we learn of Negro Africa 

 from Egyptian records and classical 

 writers, its story is in the main a 

 closed book, apart from histories 

 of medieval Sudanese empires. 

 The distribution of African lan- 

 guages makes it clear that great 

 migrations have taken place, but 

 our analysis of African culture 

 and our knowledge of the lan- 

 guages are not yet sufficiently 

 advanced for us profitably to 

 speculate as to the source of the 

 various elements. 



The negro is allied, zoologically, 

 to the negroid, e.g. Melanesians, to 

 the pygmy, and to the negrito, e.g. 

 Semang and Aeta ; except as re- 

 gards hair, he comes nearer to the 

 anthropoids than do the white 

 races. He is usually long-headed, 

 of moderate stature, long-legged 

 and long-armed, with a complexion 

 varying from yellow- brown through 

 red-brown to a blackish-brown. 



Negro languages fall into many 

 groups, some almost monosyllabic 



and isolating, others indicating the 

 relation of words in a sentence by 

 prefixes, as do the Bantu lan- 

 guages, others by suffixes. Especi- 

 ally in the monosyllabic languages, 

 musical tones, resembling those of 

 Chinese, play an important part. 

 There are probably over 1,000 

 negro and 400 Bantu languages. 



The religion of the negro is 

 ancestor worship in the E. and S., 

 ancestor worship combined with a 

 cult of a sky god, nature spirits, 

 deified men, or demi-gods of ill- 

 defined origin in other areas ; the 

 priest plays, as a rule, little part in 

 it. In some tribes there appears to 

 be a belief in a god who represent* 

 the general body of ancestors con- 

 ceived of as an undifferentiated 

 mass. On the W. coast ancestor 

 worship has been overlaid, but not 

 materially modified, by a belief in 

 reincarnation, probably of Egyp- 

 tian origin. Sacrifices to dead an- 

 cestors are a most important cere- 

 mony ; offerings are also made at 

 irregular intervals to evil spirits. 

 In a few places gods are believed 

 to 1 1 well in the bodies of animals. 



Side by side with religious be- 

 liefs is a strong magical element ; 

 the witch is a criminal and bunted 



