The wild aspect of the country, bush here, open plains there, with long ridges of low hills, no living soul to be seen until we arrived at the pits, and there we found a small family, who on our approach ran into the bush, but my own Bushmen called them back; they came very reluctantly, but soon became friends, some fifteen in all, a little dahka and a few beads as presents soon restored confidence amongst them. I am much interested in the Bushmen of the desert, and also in the white Bushmen of the Drakensberg mountains, because they appear from their isolation from the outer world, and cut off as they have been from the tribes that now occupy the regions around them, to be the descendants of the people who occupied the lower end of this ancient continent before the tribes from the north came down, and pushed their way south, bringing with them their Asiatic and Hebrew customs, which all without exception now practise more or less, evidently proving from what regions they had migrated. Eventually they nearly penetrated to Cape Town. Not so with the white Bushmen of the Drakensberg, the Hottentots, or Bushmen of Cape Colony, and the Bushmen of the Kalahara Desert, each retaining up to the present time distinctive physical formations and distinctive dialects, so entirely different from those tribes that come down south and overrun the southern peninsula of the African continent. These ancient aborigines of South Africa are comparatively pigmy races to those above referred to, who are as tall, robust, well-formed specimens of the human race as can be found in any part of the world. Then again their language, if it can be called such, is entirely different from any other known tongue, their thoughts are described by certain clicks, four in number, the white Bushmen of the Drakensberg have only these clicks, the Hottentots or Bush men of the Cape have, in addition to the clicks, sounds which accompany the clicks which come from the throat like grunts. The Bushmen of the desert have also these clicks, showing, I think conclusively, that these early people were in existence before languages,--what we understand by language, words formed by the mouth, tongue, and lips, as the nations of the world now converse and talk. Some of the South African missionaries have committed to paper these clicks, and they state it is a most beautiful and expressive language. At any rate, my belief is, that the earliest formed language of man was by sounds such as clicks and grunts before they advanced so far as to express their ideas by forming words, and language has been progressive as man advanced in civilisation. In travelling over South Africa and listening to the sounds of the baboons as they move about the rocks above you, you can detect a great similarity in their guttural sounds and the Bushman language, and I could quite understand when my Bushman told me he could converse with, and knew much of what these said, showing a connecting link between them.