It must be acknowledged, however, that we can hardly expect to find the genuine Egypto-Ethiopian lineaments in any considerable number among the modern Nubians. Placed as the former were, between the Egyptians on the north, the Indo-Arabian nations on the east, and the Negroes on the south and west, and this, too, through the long period of several thousand years, their features must have become sensibly modified, even in the earliest times, by that blending of race which was inseparable from their position; and as the Koldagi and other Negro tribes have, at different times, established themselves in large bodies in Nubia, we need be at no loss, I conceive, in accounting for any traces of Negro lineage in some Barábra communities of the present day. Dr. Prichard considers “the descent of the modern Nubians, or Barábra, from the Nouba (a Negro nation) of the hill country of Kordofan, to be as well established as very many facts which are regarded as certain by writers on ethnography.” With every deference to that distinguished ethnographer, we may inquire, what became of the pre-existing inhabitants when the tribes of Kordofan colonized Nubia? Were they destroyed or expelled? History makes no mention of either; and we are justified in the opinion that an amalgamation of races took place, whence some of those diversities of organization observable in the modern Nubians. That this intermixture of races has continued to the present time, the reader will find abundant evidence in other parts of this memoir; yet I cannot here refrain from adding an observation from Cailliaud, who, remarking on the shortness of life among the people of Senaar from disease and dissipation, declares that the number of Negroes which pours into the country, and the fruitfulness of the women, are the resources which serve to repair the vast and continual waste of population.[105] I may be told that this is proving too much. A sensible writer, and one who has ingeniously and instructively investigated the Nubian question, remarks as follows:—“The Arab tribes near Shendy may still, perhaps, justly boast of the purity of their blood; but, generally speaking, within the limits mentioned above, the slave or Negro population is about a sixth of the whole, and continually amalgamating with it. While nature kindly endeavours to wash out the stain, every caravan from the south or west pours in a new supply of slaves, and restores the blackening element.”[106]