306 THE PYGMY RACES OF MEN xix 



being 71*1. The glabella and supra-orbital ridge are little 

 developed, except in the oldest males. The malar bones 

 project much forwards, and the space between the orbits is 

 very wide and flat. The nasal bones are extremely small 

 and depressed, and the aperture wide ; the average nasal 

 index being 60*8, so they are the most platyrhine of races. 



With regard to the stature, we have not yet sufficient 

 materials for giving a reliable average. Quatrefages, following 

 Barrow, gives 4 feet 6 inches for the men, and 4 feet for the 

 women, and speaks of one individual of the latter sex, who 

 was the mother of several children, measuring only 3 feet 

 9 inches in height, but later observations (still, however, 

 insufficient in number) give a rather larger stature; thus 

 Topinard places the average at 1*404 metres, or 4 feet 7-g- 

 inches ; and Fritsch, who measured six male Bushmen in 

 South Africa, found their mean height to be 1*444 metres, 

 or nearly 4 feet 9 inches. It is probable that, taking 

 them all together, they differ but little in size from the 

 Andamanese, although in colour, in form of head, in features, 

 and in the proportions of the body, they are widely removed 

 from them. 



There is every reason to believe that these Bushmen repre- 

 sent the earliest race of which we have, or are ever likely 

 to have, any knowledge, inhabiting the southern portion 

 of the African continent, but that long before the advent of 

 Europeans upon the scene, they had been invaded from the 

 north by Negro tribes, who, being superior in size, strength, 

 and civilisation, had taken possession of the greater part of 

 their territories, and, mingling freely with the aborigines, had 

 produced the mixed race called Hottentots, who retained the 

 culture and settled pastoral habits of the Negroes, with many 

 of the physical features of the Bushmen. These, in their turn, 

 encroached upon by the pure-bred Bantu Negroes from the 

 north, and by the Dutch and English from the south, are now 

 greatly diminished, and indeed threatened with the same fate 

 that will surely soon befall the scanty remnant of the early 

 inhabitants who still retain their primitive type. 



At present the habitat of the Bushman race is confined to 

 certain districts in the south-west of Africa, from the confines 



