Liberia <+- 



At some unknown period in the history of human move- 

 ments in Africa, at a time when the pure Negro had occupied 

 in force the whole of West Africa south of the Niger and the 

 Senegal (no doubt licking up and absorbing foregoing Pygmy 

 or Bushman races) there must have wandered across the Sahara 

 Desert, along the Atlantic coast or across the Sudan from 

 Egypt, via Lake Chad, to the Upper Niger, the pioneers of 

 the Caucasian in some such form as the Libyan, that remarkable 

 race which at the present day in spite of numerous Arab 

 conquests still dominates the Sahara Desert and a good deal 

 of North Africa from the shores of the Mediterranean to the 

 Senegal, the Niger, and Lake Chad. The Libyan, who fuses 

 by imperceptible gradings into the Berber, the Iberian, and the 

 dark-haired white man of the Mediterranean, is a direct 

 descendant from the original Dravidian stock which developed 

 into the Caucasian race. He is fundamentally the basic race 

 of North Africa, Ancient Egypt, Syria, . and Southern and 

 Western Arabia. These Libyans, with the closely allied Hamites 

 (who speak cognate languages, and who possibly only differ 

 from the Libyans by greater admixture of Dravidian and early 

 Negro blood) dominate the whole third of Africa north ot the 

 Senegal, Lake Chad, the Bahr-al-Ghazal, and the Blue Nile. 

 It is they who throughout this long line of attack have pertinaci- 

 ously interfered with the Negro for thousands of years, before 

 the European Renaissance and the development of sea naviga- 

 tion sent the races of Northern and Western Europe to attack 

 Negroland from its ocean coasts. This early Caucasian Libyan 

 type did its best to save the Negro from relapsing into the 

 condition of an anthropoid ape. 



When the first Negroes reached Africa they were in tin- 

 earliest Stone Age. They might not even have known the 

 use of fire, or rather, the way to make fire (as is the ease with 



892 



