304 W. Hammond Tooke.— The Star [Oct. 31, 



THE STAR LORE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES. 



By W. Hammond Tooke. 



[Read 31st October, 1888.J 



It is with much diffidence that the writer places the following few 

 notes upon some of the conceptions held by the barbarous tribes 

 peopling South Africa respecting the heavenly bodies before the 

 members of this Society. 



The facts are too few and fragmentary to justify any attempts to 

 formulate a theory on them, nor has any such attempt been made. 

 They are merely recorded here for the sake of comparison. 



It may be held that they are not of any practical interest ; but 

 such as they are, it is from these almost trivial data that powerful 

 side lights are sometimes thrown upon what would otherwise be 

 completely buried in the mists of obscurity, namely the unwritten 

 history of the races, some prolific, some nearing extermination, which 

 preceded the European occupation of this continent. And they help 

 us to realise a mental condition which has much to teach us, both 

 by its resemblances to our own and by its dissimilarities. 



" It is," says Professor Drummond, " a wonderful thing to look 

 at this weird world of human beings, half animal, half children, 

 wholly savage and wholly heathen . . . It is an education to 

 see this sight, an education in the meaning and history of man. It 

 is to have watched the dawn of evolution. It is to have the great 

 moral and social problems of life, of anthropology, of ethnology 

 and even of theology, brought home to the imagination in the most 

 new and startling light." 



BUSHMAN. 



Two of the most remarkable characteristics of the South African 

 Bushman, that " ungllickseliges Kind des Augenblicks," apparently 

 the most degraded type of humanity existing, are (1) his pictorial 

 talent and (2) his acquaintance with the " starry heavens above us." 

 The Homeric Greek has not done more towards distinguishing the 

 Stars of the northern hemisphere than have the half-starved outcasts 

 of the Kalahari Desert or the cave-dwellers of the Drakensberg in 

 respect of those spangling our southern skies. 



