Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/194

182 their neighboring race, the Ambuelos, from whom they obtain food for ivory. He describes them as a nomadic people, never sleeping two nights in the same encampment; that they wander about in groups of from four to six families, over all the territory that lies between the Cuchi and the Cubango, and that they are the only people in Africa that do not cook their food, eating it raw. He makes the interesting statement, that it is the crossing of this people with the negroes that has produced, in his opinion, the race of mulattoes so well known in the lower part of South Africa by the name of Bushmen; a race who differ from those from which they have sprung, as they cook their food, and are of a good disposition, though quite opposed to civilization. He states that fevers prevail all along the river-banks of the Zambesi, and in the lands adjoining the river, but that the country extending inland from the highlands of Benguela is the most suitable territory in all tropical Africa for colonization, being five thousand feet above the sea, fertile, well watered, and healthy. The people, he says, are docile, capable of improvement, are very fond of dress, and that a market would here be found for the consumption of foreign manufactures.

 

HE character of the dress of a person stands so near to the character of the person who is the wearer of it that it is difficult to touch on one without introducing the other. All sorts of sympathies are evoked by dress. Political sympathies are in the most intimate of relationships with dress; social sympathies are indexed by it; artistic sympathies are of necessity a part of it. In a word, the dress is the outward and visible skin of the creature that carries it.

A charming and at the same time a very useful lecture might be written on the metaphysics of dress; but in this practical day, when the useful only is tolerated and the charming is considered superfluous—I mean, of course, in a lecture—I must let all attempt at such a combination fall to the ground. I must deal only with what is purely physical; the physical body and the physical stuff that is put on it dress—in relation to health.