-* Introduction 



Introduction had hoped that at last the lost ten tribes of 

 Israel had been allowed to rest in peace, and it is a matter 

 (to him) of much regret that Captain Merker, who has 

 written such valuable studies on the folklore and customs 

 of the Masai, should have again revived this hobby of 

 the nineteenth century by deducing from his observations 

 that the Masai an ancient mixture of Negro and Gala 

 are a people of Semitic origin. The linguistic evidence 

 to support this theory is valueless, if a careful study is 

 made of the other idioms of the Nilotic Negro peoples. 

 The slight non-Negro element in the Masai tongue is 

 akin to Somali and Gala, and has either been borrowed 

 direct from contact with those peoples of Hamitic 

 (Caucasian) stork, or may have arisen from the ancient 

 fusion of the two races on the Negro borderland. The 

 Somali and Gala languages belong to the Hamitico-Libyan 

 family, which possibly included the ancient Egyptian 

 speech ; and this group has an extremely distant con- 

 nection in its most remote origin with the Semitic 

 languages, of which Hebrew is one of the many dialects. 

 The customs of the Masai, which Captain Merker deems 

 to be particularly Hebrew, are met with in othsr groups of 

 Nile Negroes, amongst Hamite peoples, South Arabians, 

 and ancient Egyptians. In venturing to express, very 

 humbly, his deep appreciation of Herr Schillings' natural- 

 history studies, the writer of this Introduction does not wish 

 at the same time to endorse the theories attributed to 

 Captain Merker. These, however, form no essential part 

 of the most beautiful, accurate, and complete picture of 

 the East African wilderness which has -yet been given to 



xx i 



