They all belong to the ‘Bantu’ family of African natives, which, as regards _language_, is sharply distinguished from the ‘Negro’ peoples of West Africa and the Soudan. In other respects, it is more difficult to draw the line. As long as our ideas of the ‘Negro’ were taken from degraded and exaggerated types found in the unhealthy Niger delta and the slave-trading ports of the Guinea coast, it was easy to say that the Bantu were altogether on a higher level, and attribute the difference to some hypothetical admixture of Arab or other Asiatic blood. A better acquaintance with the inland peoples of the Guinea region shows that the difference is not so great as one had supposed. But the question which was the main stock whence the other parted off, and that as to the exact nature of the difference between them, need not be discussed here, as our concern is entirely with the Bantu. Perhaps it is scarcely necessary to explain that this word, or something very like it, means ‘people,’ in the language of (roughly speaking) every tribe from the Cape of Good Hope to Lake Victoria and the great loop of the Congo, with the exception of the Kora and Nama (Hottentots), the Bushmen, and the Masai. It was adopted as a convenient designation when Bleek had shown how closely these languages were interrelated, and has never been superseded by any other. The Bantu, then, are brown (not black), and have woolly hair, growing continuously over the head, and not in separate tufts, like the Bushmen. The nose is broad and somewhat flattened (but the last is by no means invariably the case), and the lips thick, from being turned outward more than they are in Europeans; but this, too, is not always very marked. The hair is black, and the eyes generally dark brown, sometimes hazel. The colour of the skin varies very much in different tribes, and even in individuals of the same tribe. Sir Harry Johnston says: ‘There are extremes met with in the individual members of a tribe, as well as a general tendency to be detected in one tribe or another towards greater average darkness or lightness of skin. As a rule, the negro of British Central Africa is decidedly black, so far as any human skin is really black—the nearest approach to actual black being a deep, dull slaty-brown. I should say that the average skin-tint is ... a dark chocolate.’ If I can trust my recollection of the Anyanja, they were many of them not quite so dark as this; but in the Blantyre district they are intermixed with the Yaos, who are described by the same writer as ‘probably the lightest-tinted tribe’ in the region under review. The soles of the feet and palms of the hands are always much lighter, and give a curious impression, as if the colour had been washed out.