JReports of Becijnents of Grants in Aid of Research. xxxv 
tribe is dreary in the extreme, and for a people devoid of proper homes and 
with insufficient clothing it is very unhealthy, owing to the rapid changes of 
temperature, the violent winds which bring clouds of dust, and the heavy, 
damp fogs at night. It is little wonder, then, that the people are saturated 
with disease and are in every sense degenerate. 
Their pastoral habits have been almost entirely abandoned since the 
Grerman occupation of Great Namaqualand, as the boundary between British 
and G-erman territory cuts right through their original tribal grounds, and 
they can no longer wander where they will. Thus the whole tribe has been 
reduced to the condition of the Strandloopers of early Dutch times. 
In spite of such unpromising material and such dismal surroundings, my 
best results were obtained in Walfish Bay. 
It is very probable that the Topnaars broke away from the main stream 
of Hottentot migration southwards many centuries ago. As they wandered 
southwards with their flocks they came upon these Naras fields, where food 
was to be had six months in the year for the simple picking of it. Yielding 
to the temptation, they remained in the neighbourhood of Walfish Bay in the 
desert coastal zone. For years they must have been isolated, and when other 
people broke in upon them it was American and English sailors who were 
hunting whales along the West Coast. 
The coming of the white man was the beginning of their ruin, but their 
degeneration has been unaccompanied by much contamination of tribal 
custom. It has become gradually laxer and less complicated, and tribal lore 
less rich ; but what there is is pure. Hence I was able to make a fairly 
complete study of their social and tribal organisation, their sociology, and 
partly too of new aspects of their religious and magical beliefs. 
Law and government could not be studied here, as the tribe has been too 
long under English influence and jurisdiction. I therefore went inland to 
Berseba, in German South West, where the Gai Khauas, a tribe which 
originally inhabited the Tulbagh district in the Cape Colony, and migrated 
across the Orange Eiver after 1809 when chieftainship was abolished by the 
British, still nominally retain their old tribal organisation and are governed 
by their own laws under their own captain. The tribe is unfortunately not 
pure, as many of the families were bastardised before ever they crossed the 
river. Their customs are therefore much modified by Dutch influence, and 
great caution has to be used in coming to any conclusions regarding their 
own original culture. However, I gained many new lights upon their 
culture here. 
All the other tribes which originally inhabited German South West are 
now disintegrated, and the whole people is fast degenerating and becoming 
bastardised. Unlike the Bushman, who died out pure, the Hottentot is 
disappearing only to leave a rapidly increasing tainted population of bastards 
behind him. Indeed, among children under ten I had the greatest difficulty 
