These small people had no fixed social organization; wandering about in hordes or as solitary individuals, without any settled habitations, they slept at night under the rocks or in wild-dog holes, or they made themselves a curious little wall of loose bushes raised up on the side from which the wind blew, and strangely like an animal's lair; and this they left again when the morning broke. They had no flocks or herds, and lived on the wild game, or, when that failed them, ate snakes, scorpions, insects, or offal, or visited the flocks of the Hottentots. They wore no clothing of any kind, and their weapons were bows and arrows, the strings of the bows being made from the sinews of wild animals, and the arrows tipped with sharpened bones or flint stones, poisoned with the juice of a bulb or dipped in the body of a poisonous caterpillar; and these formed their only property. They had no marriage ceremony, and no permanent sex relations, any man and woman cohabiting during pleasure; maternal feeling was at its lowest ebb, mothers readily forsaking their young or disposing of them for a trifle; and paternal feeling was naturally non-existent. Their language is said by those who have closely studied it to be so imperfect that the clear expression of even the very simplest ideas is difficult. They have no word for wife, for marriage, for nation; and their minds appear to be in the same simple condition as their language. The complex mental operations necessary for the maintenance of life under civilized conditions they have apparently no power of performing; no member of the race has in any known instance been taught to read or write, nor to grasp religious conceptions clearly, though great efforts have been made to instruct them. At the same time they possess a curious imitative skill, and under shelving rocks and in caves all over South Africa their rude etchings and paintings of men and animals are found, animated by a crude life and vigour. Their powers of mimicry are enormous. We have known an old Bushman, living in a place where there were a dozen Europeans; the old man could by a few contortions of the face and figure represent each one, bringing out even their subtle peculiarities of appearance and of character, without uttering a word. When he had finished his performance he would generally burst into a wild dance of artistic joy, and ask for tobacco or brandy!