106 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANATOMICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL 



received the traditions of civilisation associated for us with the name 

 of ancient Egypt. For they cover on either side of the Upper Nile, 

 between the latitudes of 10 and 17, territories in which are found 

 monuments more ancient than the oldest Egyptian monuments. If 

 this should prove to be the case, and the civilised world be forced to 

 recognise in a black people the fount of its original enlightenment, it 

 may happen that we shall have to revise entirely our view of the 

 black races, and regard those who now exist as the decadent repre- 

 sentatives of an almost forgotten era, rather than as the embryonic 

 possibility of an era yet to come." In these circumstances what 

 excites surprise is the evident standstill in the development of these 

 nations, which seems to give the lie to their former brilliant history. 

 Edris, king of Bornou, was making gunpowder for the use of his 

 armies at a period contemporary with Queen Elizabeth, and by a 

 formula upon which Waltham Abbey has scarcely, been able to im- 

 prove, and yet to-day his descendants are compelled to accept the 

 protection of hers a protection which being forced upon them must 

 be unpalatable to them because the superiority of the lethal weapons 

 of the Protector more than compensates the superiority of the animal 

 spirits and physical courage of the Protected ! It may be shown that 

 this backwardness or want of progress has been due to three signal 

 disasters which affected the nations of the Sudan and, through them, 

 all the Africa of the blacks, and which effectively blocked the Sudan, 

 and closed it to the outside world. These disasters were the Moorish 

 Conquest of the Eastern Sudan in the sixteenth century, the African 

 Slave Trade into which the English were initiated by Sir John Haw- 

 kins, who in one of his voyages visited Sierra Leone, and the Fulani 

 Conquest of the Western Sudan in the early years of last century. 



3. ORIGIN OF THE HAUSAS. 



The state of civilisation exhibited by the Hausa States has led to 

 all sorts of theories being advanced as to the origin of the Hausa 

 pro) >Ic. The general principle on which these theories are based is 

 that no good thing can come out of Blackland, and the object with 



