Liberia *- 



had begun to learn the use of metals and were leaving the 

 Stone Age. They had already received from the north a 

 domestic ox, and earlier still the goat and the sheep. The dog 

 no doubt had accompanied them to Liberia at a most remote 

 period, thousands and thousands of years ago, though it, like 

 most of the Negro's domestic animals, came from the east and 

 north. The domestic fowl began to enter this region, one 

 might say at a guess, about fifteen hundred years ago. 1 



Perhaps about the same time the Guinea corn (sorghum) 

 and eleusine were introduced, having found their way overland 

 from Egypt via Lake Chad to the Niger and thence to the 

 Mandingo Plateau. Rice may have been cultivated about eight 

 or nine hundred years ago, having first been brought by the 

 earliest Arab traders and settlers to the Niger regions. Whether 

 the sugar-cane was introduced in the same way, or much later 

 by the Portuguese direct from America, is not certain. It would 

 almost seem as though the sugar-cane (from the Oriental region) 

 had been brought across Africa from Egypt to the Niger and 

 up the Niger to the Senegal and so on to the Wolof country 

 at the mouth of that river, by Arabs or Islamised Berbers. From 

 the mouth of the Senegal it may have crept down the West 

 African coast from river to river till it reached Liberia and passed 

 on beyond. It is equally probable, however, that the sugar-cane 

 (which reached the Mediterranean by means of the Arabs 

 [Saracens]) was carried from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 

 islands by the Portuguese and Spanish, and thence found a fresh 

 home in Tropical America, from which it was introduced into 

 the coast-lands of Sierra Leone and Liberia by the Portuguese 

 navigators in the sixteenth century. 



1 My reasons for asserting this recent introduction of the domestic fowl hav<- 

 been given in previous writings on East Africa. The fowl did not reach Egypt till 

 after the Persian invasion, in B.C. 400 (about). 



900 



