0314 



Reason and Instinct. 



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 the 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. 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 outrages 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." Add to this, that 

 where vicinity to the residence of owners of flocks and herds, or the 

 numerical strength of their hordes permits it, marauding propensities, 

 quite equal in intensity to those of the lion or the wolf, display them- 

 selves, and are indulged quite as regardlessly as by either of those 

 animals, while the poisoned shafts of the Bushmen are more dreaded 

 by the herdsmen whose cattle are attacked, — as well as more than as 

 dangerous to them, — than the fangs of the fiercest lion ; so that it has 

 often become necessary for the industrious Griquas or Bechuanas, 

 whose neighbourhood was infested by some horde of these Lilliputian 

 savages, to resolve to attack the Bushmen and accomplish their 

 destruction at whatever cost. 



As to the condition of the Digger, precisely parallel to that of the 

 Bushman, Lieutenant Ruxton will bear testimony. Speaking of a 

 journey taken by certain persons, he says, " They came upon a 

 band of miserable Indians, who, from the fact of their subsisting 

 chiefly on roots, are called Diggers. A few of these wretched 

 creatures came into camp at Sundown ; they appeared to have no other 

 food in their village but bags of dried ants and their larvae, and a few 

 roots of the yampah. Their huts were constructed of a few bushes 

 of grease-wood piled up as a sort of breakwind in which they huddled 

 in their filthy skins." — (Far West, p. 102). " They were now entering," 

 he continues, " a country inhabited by the most degraded and abject 

 of the western tribes, who, nevertheless, ever suffering from the 

 extremities of hunger, have their brutish wits sharpened by the 

 necessity of procuring food, and rarely fail to levy a contribution of 

 rations, of horse or mule flesh, on the passenger in their inhospitable 



