1050 OF THE HUMAN FAMILY, AND THEIR MUTUAL RELATIONS. 



admixture of the characters of the Mongolian with those of the Negro. Thus 

 the face presents the very wide and high cheek-bones, with the oblique eyes and 

 flat nose, of the Northern Asiatics ; at the same time that, in the somewhat 

 prominent muzzle and thick lips, it resembles the countenance of the Negro. 

 The complexion is of a tawny buff or fawn color, like the black of the Negroes 

 diluted with the olive of the Mongols. The hair is woolly, like that of the 

 Negroes, but it grows in small tufts scattered over the surface of the scalp (like 

 a scrubbing-brush), instead of covering it uniformly; thus resembling in its 

 comparative scantiness that of the Northern Asiatics. It is most interesting to 

 observe this remarkable resemblance in physical characters, between the Hot- 

 tentots and the Mongolian races, in connection with the similarity that exists 

 between the circumstances under which .they respectively live; and it is not a 

 little curious that the Hottentot, as the Mongol, should be distinguished by the 

 extraordinary acuteness of his vision. No two countries can be more similar 

 than the vast steppes of Central Asia, and the karroos of Southern Africa; and 

 the proper inhabitants of each are nomadic races, wandering through deserts 

 remarkable for the wide expansion of their surface, their scanty herbage, and 

 the dryness of their atmosphere, and feeding upon the milk and flesh of their 

 horses and cattle. Of the original pastoral Hottentots, however, very few now 

 remain. They have been gradually driven, by the encroachments of European 

 colonists and by internal wars with each other, to seek refuge among the inac- 

 cessible rocks and deserts of the interior; and they have thus been converted 

 from a mild, unenterprising race of shepherds, into wandering hordes of fierce, 

 suspicious, and vindictive savages, treated as wild beasts by their fellow-men, 

 until they have become really assimilated to wild beasts in their habits and dis- 

 positions. This transformation has taken place, under the observation of eye- 

 witnesses, in the Koranas, a tribe of Hottentots well known to have been pre- 

 viously the most advanced in all the improvements which belong to pastoral 

 life; for having been plundered by their neighbors, and driven out into the 

 wilderness to subsist upon wild fruits, they have adopted the habits of the 

 Bushmen, and have become assimilated in every essential particular to that 

 miserable tribe. It appears, however, from the inquiries of Dr. Andrew Smith, 

 that this process of degradation has been in operation quite independently of 

 external agencies; nearly all the South African tribes who have made any 

 advances in civilization, being surrounded by more barbarous hordes, whose 

 abodes are in the wildernesses of mountains and forests, and who constantly 

 recruit their numbers by such fugitives as crime and destitution may have driven 

 from their own more honest and more thriving communities; and these people 

 vary their mode of speech designedly, and even adopt new words, in order to 

 make their meaning unintelligible to all but the members of their own com- 

 munity. All this has its complete parallel in the very midst of our own or any 

 other highly civilized community; all our large towns containing spots nearly 

 as inaccessible to those unacquainted with them as are the rude caves or clefts 

 of hills, or the burrows scooped out of the level karroo, in which the wretched 

 Bushman lies in wait for his prey; and these being tenanted by a people that 

 have been well characterized as les classes danger euses, which, as often as the 

 arm of the law is paralyzed, issue forth from the unknown deserts within which 

 they lurk, and rival in their fierce indulgence of the most degrading passions, 

 and in their excesses of wanton cruelty, the most terrible exhibitions of barba- 

 rian inhumanity. Such outcasts, in all nations, purposely adopt, like the Bush- 

 men, "a flash" language; and in their general character and usages, there is a 

 most striking parallel. 1 



1059. The American nations, taken collectively, form a group which appears 



1 See "London Labor and London Poor," p. 2. 



