58o 



NA TURE 



{April 1 7, I ; 



Another inference is tli.it tlie Congo cannot possibly 

 form a true parting-line or natural boundary in the dis- 

 tribution of the West African flora and fauna. " I have 

 read in many works on Africa that the Congo was the 

 southern boundary of the habitat of the gray parrot, the 

 anthropoid apes, and the oil-palm {Elais i;n!>!Ci'ns!.s). 

 Now the gray parrot reaches, perhaps, its great develop- 

 ment in Malanje, a distri:t of Angola nearly 300 miles 

 south of the Congo, and, together with the oil palm, con- 

 tinues to be found as far as the tenth degree sovith of the 

 equator, while the anthropoid apes can hardly be said to 

 be limited southward in their distribution by the lower 

 course of the Congo, for they do not reach even to its 

 northern bank, or approach it nearer than Landana, 100 

 miles away. . . . There are, besides, many West African 

 plants which stretch right away from the Gambia, across 

 the Congo, into Angola on the south. In short, I have 

 never seen any difference between the fauna and flora of 

 the northern and southern banks of this great river ; nor 

 do I believe that it acts in any way as a limitation in the 

 range of species " (p. 318). 



On another point also our explorer differs from some 

 distinguished botanists, who hold that tropical vegetation 

 is inferior in brightness and fragrance to that of the tem- 

 perate zone. " Although the Congo offers nothing, as we 

 yet know, that is unique as genus or family, yet probably 

 nowhere in Africa arc there such magnificent displays of 

 colour formed by the conspicuous flowering trees and 

 plants. Here, at any rate, no one can maintain that the 

 temperate zone can offer anything equal in the way of 

 flower-shows. Many of the blossoms also exhale strong 

 odours, sometimes very offensive, but also in many case^ 

 frr grant and delicious. Few perfumes are more pleasing 

 than the clove like smell of the Camocnsia or the balmy 

 scent of the Bnpkias" (p. 324). 



His botanical descriptions and sketches are generally 

 admirable, as, for instance, of the Lissochiliis gigauieus 

 (see Fig 2), " a splendid orchid that shoots up often to 

 the height of six feet from the ground, bearing such a 

 head of red-mauve, golden-centred blossoms as scarcely 

 any flower in the world can equal for beauty and delicacy 

 of form. These orchids, with their light-green, spear-like 



, Mu-teke ; 3, Mu-shi-Kongo. 



leaves, and their tall swaying flower-stalks, grow in 

 groups of forty or fifty together, often reflected in the 

 shallow pools of stagnant water round their bases, and 

 filling up the foreground of the high purple-green forest 

 with a blaze of tender peach-like colour, upon which no 

 European could gaze unmoved'" (p. 35). 



There is a deeply interesting chapter on the "People 

 of the Congo," who, with the doubtful exception of some 

 dwarfish or Bushman tribes, are all grouped in " that great 

 Bantu family which, when seen in its purest exemplars, 

 the Ova-hi^rero and Ova-mpo of the south-west, the tribes 

 of the Zambesi, the people of the great lakes of Tangan- 

 yika and Nyassa, and the western shores of Victoria 

 Nyanzi, and finally of the Upper Congo, is so distinct, 

 physically and linguistically, from the divers Negro, 

 Negroid, and Hamitic populations to the north of it, and 

 fjoni the Hottentot-Bushman group to the south" (p. 

 396). Here we find the Bantus as a lac; distinguished 

 by a good observer, not only from the Hottentots, 

 Hamites, and Negroes proper, but even from the sur- 

 rounding Negroid populations Further on the Bantus 



themselves are said to vary considerably in physical ap- 

 pearance, a statement fully borne out by the accompany- 

 ing typical heads of a Mu-yansi, a Mu-t^ke, and a Mu- 

 sbi-Kongo (see Fig. 3). "The Congo tribes,'' we are 

 told, " on nearing the coast, begin to lose their distinctive 

 Bantu character, either through the degradation the 

 coast climate seems to entail, or because on their migra- 

 tion westward from the north-east Bantu focus, they 

 originally met and mixed with, in the low- lying coast- 

 lands, an earlier Negro population. This latter supposi- 

 tion sometimes strikes mc as being the true one, for the 

 reason that, in such a littoral tribe as the Kabinda or 

 Loango people, there are distinctly two types of race. 

 C ne — the Bantu — a fine, tall, upright man, with delicately 

 small hands, and well-shaped feet, a fine face, high thin 

 nose, beard, moustache, and a plentiful crop of hair ; the 

 other .in ill-shaped loosely-made figure, with splay feet, 

 high calves, a retreating chin, blubber lips, no hair about 

 the face, and the wool on his head close and crisply 

 curled. The farther you go into the interior the finer the 

 type becomes, and two points about them contrast very 



