Putting together the slender evidence we have as to the prehistoric past of Africa at a period of, let us say, 10,000 years ago—evidence represented by stone implements, a few skulls of ancient date, rock engravings in Mauretania, the earliest archaeological remains in Lower Egypt—we may hazard the following conclusions. At that period the coastal fringe of North Africa from Morocco to Egypt was inhabited by Caucasian or semi-Caucasian races allied in the west, perhaps, to the Fula type, and in the east (Cyrenaica and Egypt) to the Libyan or Berber. There may even then have been the beginning of Semitic settlements on the Isthmus of Suez and the Suez coast of the Red Sea. These same Libyans or Hamites, at that period not strongly differentiated from the Proto-Semites in race and language, and emphatically “white men,” had probably also penetrated to the highlands of Abyssinia, and by mixture with the precedent negroes and bushmen were forming the modern Hamitic races. Some of these white men (besides the more negroid Galas) had found their way down the more open, less densely-forested east coast of Africa to Zambezia and South Africa[7]. But beyond this white fringe of Northern and North-eastern Africa, the rest of the Dark continent was then the domain of the negro in his Bushman and black-skinned types. The Sahara desert was not such a rainless region then as now, but was more habitable and inhabited. On the other hand, much of Central and some of Southern Africa was still under water, covered with as yet undrained, unevaporated shallow lakes. The vast forests of the centre and parts of the west may have been uninhabited by man, afraid to encounter the chimpanzees and gorillas, the leopards, pythons, and elephants which tenanted them. Then, 10,000 years ago, more or less, there came into the Nile valley from the direction of Abyssinia the wonderful race of the Dynastic Egyptians[8], whose original home seems to have been, first, South-West Arabia, and next, the Danákil country, the coast-line of Abyssinia. The Dynastic Egyptians were apparently a composite type, mainly of Hamitic stock, impregnated with an ancient negroid strain and tinged to some extent with Mongol blood from the early Mongolian invaders of Mesopotamia. Their language remains an unsolved problem to this day. It offers decided affinities with both Hamitic and Proto-Semitic, and yet contains puzzling elements of its own which may be due both to negro and to Mongolian influence. In the main it is an aberrant Hamitic tongue; but with no very close resemblance to Gala or Somali, or to the Bisharin dialects of Eastern Nubia. These (be it remarked) seem to have been spoken for an enormously long period of time; and possibly the Bisharin (Hamitic) natives of the Red Sea coast-lands—Rudyard Kipling’s “Fuzzie-wuzzies”—were living where they now are when the dynastic Egyptians poured as a Neolithic conquering host into the Nile valley in