Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/403

 REVIEWS.

This valuable work deals historically rather than descriptively with the native races—Bushmen, Hottentots, and Bantu; but for all that, there is much information for the anthropologist, especially with regard to the Bushmen. An especially valuable feature is the map showing Mr. Stow's conclusions as to lines of tribal migration, which, if criticisable in detail, is none the less of the highest importance. As was to be expected, a great antiquity is assigned to the Bushmen, both on a priori grounds and because their traditions, no less than their rock-paintings and carvings, bear evidence in favour of their prior occupancy of the soil. The Hottentots, in Mr. Stow's view, were relatively few in number—not more than 40,000 in all—and came from the north-east, striking the Atlantic on the west coast and then working their way southwards to the Cape of Good Hope, where they were found by sixteenth-century voyagers no very long time after their migration had been arrested by the waves of the ocean. Mr. Stow holds that the Bushmen, no less than the later invaders, came from the north, but in their case he can assign no cause and no date for the migration; the Hottentots, however, were, he conceives, forced southward by the pressure of the Bantu, who themselves eventually came southward in their wake in successive waves.