When speaking to the _Archimagus_ concerning the Hottentots, those heterogeneous animals according to the Portuguese and Dutch accounts, he asked me, whether they builded and planted—and what sort of food they {135} chiefly lived upon. I told him, I was informed that they dwelt in small nasty huts, and lived chiefly on sheep’s guts and crickets. He laughed, and said there was no credit to be given to the far-distant writers of those old books, because they might not have understood the language and customs of the people; but that those, whom our books reported to live on such nasty food, (if they did not deceive us) might have been forced to it for the want of better, to keep them from dying; or by the like occasion, they might have learned that ugly custom, and could not quit it when they were free from want, as the Choktah eat horse-flesh, though they have plenty of venison: however, it was very easy, he said, to know whether they were possessed of human reason, for if they were endued with shame to have a desire of covering their nakedness, he concluded them to be human. He then asked me, whether I had been informed of their having any sort of language, or method of counting as high as the number of their fingers, either by words or expressive motion; or of bearing a nearer resemblance to _Yáwe_, the human creature, in laughter, than _Shawe_ the ape bore; or of being more social and gregarious than those animals of the country where they lived. If they were endued with those properties, he affirmed them to be human creatures; and that such old lying books should not be credited.