It is easy for _us_ sitting at ease in our study chairs to-day to condemn the attitude of the early white men, Dutch or English, towards him, and regret that they did not take a more scientific interest in this little half-developed child of South Africa. To the thinking man of to-day he is a link with the past of our race; a living prehistoric record; his speech, his scheme of social life, his physical structure, are a volume in human history, beside which the most hoary manuscript in China or India is modern; and the oldest relics of Greece and Rome are things of to-day. It is easy for _us_ to feel tender over his little paintings when suddenly we come across them among the rocks; the artist in us recognizes across the chasm of a million centuries of development its little kinsman. Something in us nods back to him across the years:--"I know why you did that, little brother: I do it too--another way, pen or pencil or stone, it doesn't matter which. You call it an ox: I call it truth. We both paint what we see, the likest we can! They never know why we do it. Did you look at your oxen and your zebras and your ostriches, and feel that you must and you must, till you painted or etched them? Take my hand, brother manikin!" Ring round head, ears on pedestals, his very vital organs differing from the rest of his race--yet, as one sits under the shelving rocks at the top of some African mountain, the wall behind one covered with his crude little pictures, the pigments of which are hardly faded through the long ages of exposure, and, as one looks out over the great shimmering expanse of mountain and valleys beneath, one feels that that spirit which is spread abroad over existence concentrated itself in those little folk who climbed among the rocks; and that that which built the Parthenon and raised St. Peter's, and carved the statues of Michael Angelo in the Medici Chapel, and which moves in every great work of man, moved here also. That that Spirit of Life which, incarnate in humanity, seeks to recreate existence as it beholds it, and which we call art, worked through that small monkey hand too! And that shelving cave on the African mountain becomes for us a temple, in which first the hand of humanity raised itself quiveringly in the worship of the true and of the beautiful. And when in the valley below we come suddenly across a little arrow-head beside some old drinking-fountain, or find a spot where his flints and empty mussel-shells lie thick among the soil on the bank of a sloot where for this many hundred years now no mussels have been, a curious thrill of interest comes to us: we feel as would an adult who in middle life should come suddenly across the shoes and toys he had used in earliest childhood, carefully laid up together.