16 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



Photo by Kermit Roosevelt. Copyright by Charles Scribner's Sons 

 STRIPED HYENA CAUGHT BY HELPER 



The expedition took hundreds of traps with them with which 

 they obtained thousands of small mammals for the National 

 Museum. 



they went on their expeditions a map of 

 mid-Africa was published under the au- 

 spices of the Royal Geographic Society 

 in England, and on that map the sources 

 of the Nile were more imperfectly shown 

 than they were shown on the map of the 

 Ptolemies in the year 150. In other words, 

 during 17 centuries the geographic knowl- 

 edge of Africa had gone slightly back- 

 wards. The men of the first half of the 

 nineteenth century — the scientists in Eng- 

 land, in France, in Germany, and in 

 Italy of the first half of the nineteenth 



century — knew less 

 about the geography of 

 middle Africa than the 

 scientists who lived in 

 Antioch and Alexan- 

 dria and Rome in the 

 first half of the second 

 century. As a whole, 

 during 1,700 years 

 knowledge had gone a 

 little backward as re- 

 gards that part of Af- 

 rica. 



When those first ex- 

 plorers reached Uganda 

 they found a semi- 

 civilized region where 

 both men and women 

 were well clothed ; 

 where they manufac- 

 tured their own cloth ; 

 where they had good 

 ironsmiths, good work- 

 ers in iron ; where they 

 tilled the ground ; 

 where they used musi- 

 cal instruments ; where 

 they had, curiously 

 enough, joined to a 

 very cruel despotism of 

 the regular African 

 type a system of repre- 

 sentative government. 

 It is not possible to tell 

 exactly how that little 

 semi-civilization arose. 

 Probably what hap- 

 pened was, that there 

 came a tribe of north- 

 ern invaders — men of 

 Hamitic or bastard Semitic blood — who 

 conquered these negro tribes of middle 

 Africa. The invaders were a compara- 

 tively light-skinned, pastoral people, with 

 herds of long-horned cattle. Some of 

 the invaders remained almost separate. 

 Others mixed with the negroes, produc- 

 ing a type that is predominantly negro, 

 with a slight strain of the northern in- 

 vader. It was this mixed type that went 

 upward, and not the relatively pure type 

 of northern invader; and now the pas- 

 toral people occupy a distinctly subordi- 



