seamanship to ferry himself across the zoological divide, and to take
his faithful dog with him on board his raft or dug-out. Until we have
facts whereon to build, however, it would be as unpardonable to lay
down the law on these matters as it is permissible to fill up the blank
by guesswork.
It remains to round off our original survey by a word or two more about
the farther extremities, west, south, and east, of this vast southern
world, to which south-eastern Asia furnishes a natural approach. The
negroes did not have Africa, that is, Africa south of the Sahara, all
to themselves. In and near the equatorial forest-region of the west
the pure type prevails, displaying agricultural pursuits such as the
cultivation of the banana, and, farther north, of millet, that must
have been acquired before the race was driven out of the more open
country. Elsewhere occur mixtures of every kind with intrusive
pastoral peoples of the Mediterranean type, the negro blood, however,
tending to predominate; and thus we get the Fulahs and similar stocks
to the west along the grassland bordering on the desert; the Nilotic
folk amongst the swamps of the Upper Nile; and throughout the eastern
and southern parkland the vigorous Bantu peoples, who have swept the
Bushmen and the kindred Hottentots before them down into the desert
country in the extreme south-west. It may be added that Africa has
a rich fauna and flora, much mineral wealth, and a physical
configuration that, in respect to its interior, though not to its
coasts, is highly diversified; so that it may be doubted whether the
natives have reached as high a pitch of indigenous culture as the
resources of the environment, considered by itself, might seem to
warrant. If the use of iron was invented in Africa, as some believe,
it would only be another proof that opportunity is nothing apart from
the capacity to grasp it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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