82 



PHYSIQUE. 



has to grope through the glooms of the past, 

 guided only by the power to avail himself of the 

 dimmest present lights. I vehemently doubt, 

 moreover, the antiquity of maritime races in 

 Tropical Africa — a subject which has been dis- 

 cussed in my sundry studies of the "Western 

 Coast. A case in point is the latest move of the 

 pastoral Wamasai. 



Physically the Wanyika race is not inferior 

 to other negroids, nor degraded as is the Congo 

 negro. Like the Galla and the Somal, the skull 

 is pyramido-oval, flattened and depressed at the 

 moral region of the phrenologist — a persistent 

 form amongst savages and barbarians — and 

 straight or ' wall-sided ' above the ears, a shape 

 common both to ' Semite ' and negro. The features 

 are 'Hamitic' only from the eyes downwards: 

 the brow is moderately high, broad, and conical ; 

 the orbits are tolerably distant ; the face is 

 somewhat broad and plain, with well- developed 

 zygomata ; the nose is depressed with patulated 

 nostrils, coarse and ill-turned ; the lips are 

 hordes, fleshy and swelling, and the jaw is dis- 

 tinctly prognathous. The beard is scant ; the 

 hair, which though wiry, yet grows compara- 

 tively long, is shaved off the forehead from ear 

 to ear, and hangs down in the thinnest of cork- 



