360 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1707. 



Their stature is a middle size ; they are clean limbed, well proportioned, and 

 very nimble; and I never saw a fat person among them. They besmear their 

 faces and bodies all over with grease, or other oleaginous stuff, which, with 

 exposing their bodies, to a warm sun, makes their skin of a tawny colour. They 

 adorn their hair with shells, pieces of copper, &c. Both sexes are clad with 

 the skin commonly of a sheep, but sometimes of such wild beasts as they happen 

 to kill, the hairy side outwards in summer, and inward in winter, off which I 

 have seen them pick and eat the lice in the streets : the women wear skins cut 

 in thongs about their legs, to the length of a great many yards ; which when 

 dry, with the inside out, look so like sheep's guts, that most strangers mistake 

 them for such. The men hang their privities in a bag, and the women cover 

 theirs with a flap or apron made of skin. The women also wear a cap of skin 

 only dried and stitched together ; but the men commonly go bare-headed ; they 

 also go bare-footed, only when they travel they wear a piece of a skin fastened 

 about their feet. Their weapons are javelins, with which they are very dex- 

 terous at hitting the mark, and bows with poisoned arrows, which are said to 

 kill on drawing blood. Their houses are hemispherical, made of mats, sup- 

 ported with stakes, so low that a tall man cannot stand upright in them : these 

 they remove upon occasion, as the ancient Nomades did their tents. 



It is said, they are the most lazy and ignorant part of mankind; so that no_ 

 kind of arts are practised among them ; no ploughing or sowing, no going to sea 

 in so much as a boat ; no use of iron or money ; no notion of God, providence, 

 or of a future state ; no tradition of creation, or a flood ; no prayers or sa- 

 crifices ; no magical rites ; nor, in short, any notion of any invisble being 

 capable of doing them either good or harm, upon the strictest enquiry that I 

 could make. The only thing that looks like the least knowledge of any 

 thing of this kind among them, is a custom they have, in moon-shine 

 nights, of dancing in the fields, of which, when asked the reason, all their 

 answer is, that it is a custom of the Hottentots, and was so of their fore- 

 fathers. 



All the resemblance they have of government is, that in every neighbour- 

 hood the eldest is first in order and dignity ; his advice as to what concerns the 

 whole .being most followed, as having most experience. The ceremony of 

 marriage is performed among them by the eldest person in the company 

 sprinkling the persons to be married with his urine, upon which, and cutting 

 out one of the man's testes, the business is over. When a woman bears twins 

 among them, she exposes one to death by hunger or cold, and nurses the other j 

 the reason of which last two customs is by some alleged to be the fear they 

 have of their nation's growing too numerous : the custom of revenging, rather 



