A hundred thousand years ago the Red Sea may have been a long, isolated lake filling up a great Rift Valley, and the south-western extremity of Arabia have been joined across the narrow straits of Bab-al-Mandib to Somaliland. There is an Arab tradition that in the remote past these straits were formed by a series of earthquakes and land-slides. But if this were the case why is not the west of Arabia, in fertile, well-watered regions, more “African” in its mammalian, bird, and insect fauna? Arabia is a great enigma still in these questions of geographical distribution. It would be convenient to regard it as the evolutionary area of the negro, if, for example, there were any evidence of a positive character—as there is in southern Persia—to show that it was ever the home of a negro race in ancient times. But there is no such evidence, and its present negro or negroid population only dates from the trade in negro slaves which began about the commencement of the Christian era, and flourished exceedingly after the eruption of Islam. “Lemuria”—the hypothetical isthmus which once united Madagascar and East Africa with India and Ceylon—could not have been the negro’s birth-place, as some have suggested, inasmuch as it ceased to exist in the early Tertiaries, long before Man had been evolved. Footnote 2: They can be gleaned—most of them—from the recent writings of Dr Arthur Keith, and Mr W. L. H. Duckworth, and are to some extent summarized in the preliminary chapter of the present writer’s book on _The Negro in the New World_. Footnote 3: These will be found described in Mr W. L. H. Duckworth’s _Morphology and Anatomy_, and also in studies of the Bushmen and Hottentots recently published by Dr Péringuey of the State Library and Museum, Capetown. It is true that the researches of German and Italian anthropologists have shown that the hypertrophy of the external genitalia characteristic of the Bushwoman, together with steatopygy, not only occur amongst the East African negroes, but even in Somaliland, Abyssinia and Egypt; but this is only an additional piece of evidence showing the previous existence of the Bushman in these regions, perhaps also in Southern Europe. Footnote 4: The name is Dutch and means “shore-runners,” there being a legend amongst the Boers derived from the Hottentots that the present race of Bushmen was preceded by a vanished type of humanity which derived its living from the shellfish on the sea-shore. Footnote 5: It is more convenient to refer to this speech family and racial type as “Fula,” but the actual name applied by the “Ful-be” people to their language is “Fulful-de.” Footnote 6: