PAINTINGS BY BUSHMEN. 185 
scenes; but, sometimes, engagements between 
themselves and the Boers. The accuracy with 
which they delineate the various species of 
game ; the characteristic lineaments of their own 
people, and those of the Boers, are certainly 
surprising, when we consider how wild and un- 
tutored the artists are. Nor is their grouping, 
by any means, faulty; the only peculiarity 
being, as is the case with Chinese paintings, 
that they have no conception of perspective, 
and all their figures are in profile. Viewing 
them, however, as productions of art, though 
certainly of the lowest grade known, they still 
display an intuitive talent for imitation, and 
added to this, a considerable amount of execu- 
tion in depicting their grotesque conceptions. 
Several of these paintings still exist in caves, in 
various localities through Southern Africa, for- 
merly inhabited by these people ; and, although 
the artists and their posterities have now all 
disappeared from around them, yet these traces 
show that they have once been there, and stand 
as isolated mementos of their intelligence, and 
rude attempts at artistic representations. 
Thus far for these chronicles of the " Bushmen 
family;" those wildest and most degraded of 
all the sons of Ham : whose history must ever 
leave on the minds of all narrators, readers, 
travellers, or beholders, feelings far removed 
