25 



Their knowledge of painting is certainly a curious and in 

 respects a redeeming trait in their character ; hut that it is 

 evidence of any pre\ious higher condition, I cannot see. Without 

 cattle, crops, or even houses, it would h(! curious indeed if 

 possessed of any human intelligence at all, it should not lind 

 expression in something. Regarding the Bushmen, and i)rol)- 

 ahly also the Hottentots, as the aborigines of the country, it is 

 not unreasonable, taken with the discovery of the skull in the 

 East London shell mound, to regard them as the lineal descend- 

 ants of the men of the shell mound age in this country ; ver}' 

 probably also of the older stone age. Tlnj piguiy races of Africa, 

 of which the Bushmen are a branch, are at the present moment 

 attracting a good deal of attention. Stanley's description of the 

 numbers which inhabit the great forest show them to be very 

 widespread in the interior. There can be little doubt, moreover, 

 that these same pigmy races were known both to the ancient 

 Greeks and Romans. Still, whatever the origin and history of 

 the pigmy races may l)e no rational student of evolution would 

 contend that the diiference between the highest ape and lowest 

 Bushman is, scientifically speaking, a slight one. 



The evidences of the existence of the progenitors of man on 

 the earth, as I have endeavoured to point out, are not to be 

 looked for a few hundred years back, but hundreds of thousands 

 of years ago. Evidence of the remote antiquity of man in this 

 country we have fully discussed. We have seen that it points 

 to his existence here many thousand years ago, when his imple- 

 ments were ruder than the lowest Bushman uses now ; for tli9 

 only stone implement of the Bushman of to-day of which I can 

 lind any authoritive record, is the rounded digging stone with a 

 hole in the centre, used for Meighting sticks with in digging up 

 roots. Livingstone in his "Last Journals," after making 

 special en(|uiry as to the use of stone implements, only mentions 

 the " digging-stone " among the Bushmen, and stones used as 



