Reason and Instinct. 5585 



sweat or reeking with their own urine, * * * * clothed in skins 

 of beasts that have passed through no process of preparation, living 

 upon wild roots or flesh and entrails, not even washed before con- 

 veyed to their mouths, spending their life in sleep or squatted and 

 smoking, they occasionally wander with a few cattle which supply 

 them with milk. * * * * They scarcely make any application 

 of fire, except to light their pipes. The domestic hearth is all but un- 

 known among them."* (Id. p. 514). " No picture of human degradation 

 and wretchedness can be drawn which exceeds the real abasement and 

 misery of the Bushmen, as we find it displayed by the most accurate 

 writers who describe this people. Without houses, or even huts, 

 living in caves and holes of the earth, these naked and half-starved 

 savages wander through forests in small companies or separate 

 families, hardly supporting their comfortless existence by collecting 

 wild roots, by a toilsome search for the eggs of ants, and by devouring, 

 whenever they can catch them, lizards, snakes and the most loathsome 

 insects. It is no matter of surprise that those writers who search for 

 approximations between mankind and the inferior orders of creation 

 fix upon the Bushmen as their favourite theme." (Id. p. 515.) "The 

 desire of revenge is one of the strongest of their passions : it urges 

 them to the most barbarous acts ; they commit the most frightful out- 

 rages under the impulse of momentary irritation. * * * * Their 

 eagerness for vengeance is so urgent as to render them indifferent on 

 whom they wreak it, provided the sufferer be of the same country as 

 the offender." (Id. p. 603.) f 



Perhaps this picture is the darkest that can be drawn of a state of 

 abasement and wretchedness to be actually the daily, living experience 

 or lot of human creatures : many, however, of its very darkest linea- 

 ments belong to the portraiture of the condition, mental and physical, 

 of several other tribes or communities or peoples. Who, then, can 

 wonder that some philosophers have thought to lessen the great diffi- 

 culty presented by the existence, the habits, the very language, of such 

 specimens of humanity, by suggesting some origin for them different 

 from that of more intellectual and less brutish nations or tribes. But 

 we believe it is now a very firmly established opinion that their low, 

 miserable, degraded, scarcely human condition, is due to progressive 

 demoralization consequent on their being driven out and treated as 



* From the French of M. Rory de St. Vincent. 



f I do not avail myself of the accounts given of the race of Dokos or Pygmies, 

 said to inhabit certain forest-lands in Africa, as they are not quite free from doubt; 

 but the narrative is very startling. See Prichard, p. 554. 



XV. 2 I 



