314 THE PIGMY RACES OF MEN xix 



to the east, south of the Galla land, are still surviving, in 

 scattered districts, communities of these small negroes, all 

 much resembling each other in size, appearance, and habits, 

 and dwelling mostly apart from their larger neighbours, by 

 whom they are everywhere surrounded. Our information 

 about them is still very scanty, and to obtain more would be 

 a worthy object of ambition for the anthropological traveller. 

 In many parts, especially at the west, they are obviously 

 holding their own with difficulty, if not actually disappearing, 

 and there is much about their condition of civilisation, and 

 the situations in which they are found, to induce us to look 

 upon them, as in the case of the Bushmen in the south and 

 the Negritos in the east, as the remains of a population 

 which occupied the land before the incoming of the present 

 dominant races. If the account of the Nasamonians related 

 by Herodotus be accepted as historical, the river they came 

 to, " flowing from west to east," must have been the Niger, 

 and the northward range of the dwarfish people far more 

 extensive twenty-three centuries ago than it is at the present 

 time. 1 



This view opens a still larger question, and takes us back 

 to the neighbourhood of the south of India as the centre 

 from which the whole of the great Negro race spread, east 

 over the African continent, and west over the islands of the 

 Pacific, and to our little Andamanese fellow - subjects as 

 probably the least modified descendants of the primitive 

 members of the great branch of the human species char- 

 acterised by their black skins and frizzly hair. 



1 Since this was written indications of the existence of a dwarf tribe in Mount 

 Atlas have been collected and published by Mr. R. G. Haliburton, and Sergi 

 and Kollman have adduced evidence tending to show the former extension of 

 small races into several regions of Southern and Central Europe. 



