THE PYGMIES. L9 



down right and left, sparing only the children, whom they tame and turn 

 into servants. The people who suffer from their depredations are Boers, 

 Griquas, and Bechuanas, all of whom are possessed of large herds of 

 cattle, and the massacre of the Bushmen, arising from these raids, is 

 endless." 



Dr. Schweinfurth, in his recent work, " The Heart of Africa," points out 

 the remarkable similarity between the Akka, a tribe of dwarfs in Central 

 Africa, who are found about 400 miles to the north of the furthest point, to 

 which Livingstone followed the Lualaba. He says : — 



" Scarcely a doubt can exist but that all these people, like the Bushmen 

 of South Africa, may be considered as the scattered remains of an aboriginal 

 population now becoming extinct ; and their isolated and sporadic existence 

 bear out the hypothesis. For centuries after centuries Africa has been 

 experiencing the effects of many emigrations; for thousands of years one 

 nation has been driving out another, and, as the result of repeated subjuga- 

 tions and interminglings of race with race, such manifold changes have been 

 introduced into the conditions of existence, that the succession of new 

 phases, like the development in the world of. plants, appears almost, as it 

 were, to open a glimpse into the infinite. 



"Incidentally I have just referred to the Bushmen, those notorious natives 

 of the South African forests, who owe their name to the likeness which the Dutch 

 colonists conceived they bore to the ape, as the prototype of the human race. 

 I may further remark that their resemblance to the equatorial Pygmies is in 

 many points very striking. Gustav Fritsch, the author of a standard work 

 upon the natives of South Africa, first drew my attention to the marked simi- 

 larity between my portraits of the Akka and the general type of the Bushmen, 

 and so satisfied did I become in my own mind that I feel quite justified (in 

 my observations upon the Akka) in endeavouring to prove that all the tribes 

 of Africa, whose proper characteristic is an abnormally low stature, belong to 

 one and the self-same race." In another place he says, " The only traveller, 

 I believe, before myself that has come into contact with any section of this 

 race is Du Chaillu, who, in the territory of Ashango, discovered a wandering 

 tribe of hunters called Obongo, and took the measurements of a number 

 of them. He describes these Obongo as ' not ill shaped,' and as having 

 skins of a pale yellow brown, somewhat lighter than their neighbours." 



From the days of Herodotus downwards, traditions of a dwarfish race 

 of human beings in Central Africa have existed, and the explorations of 

 Dr. Livingstone and others are only new teaching us how thoroughly 

 Africa was known to the ancient Greeks. We are in short only re-discovering 

 countries and peoples which had been previously discovered, and had sunk 

 into oblivion with the great people who had wrested their knowledge of 

 them froni the inhospitable regions of equatorial Africa, where pestilence 



