Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/77

Rh is the case. I hardly like to refer to civilized nations, because their natural faculties are too much modified by education to allow of their being appraised in an off-hand fashion. I may, however, speak of the French, who appear to possess the visualizing faculty in a high degree. The peculiar ability they show in prearranging ceremonials and fêtes of all kinds and their undoubted genius for tactics and strategy show that they are able to foresee effects with unusual clearness. Their ingenuity in all technical contrivances is an additional testimony in the same direction, and so is their singular clearness of expression. Their phrase "figurez-vous," or "picture to yourself," seems to express their dominant mode of perception. Our equivalent of "imagine" is ambiguous.

It is among uncivilized races that natural differences in the visualizing faculty are most conspicuous. Many of them make carvings and rude illustrations, but only a few have the gift of carrying a picture in their mind's eye, judging by the completeness and firmness of their designs, which show no trace of having been elaborated in that step by-step manner which is characteristic of draughtsmen who are not natural artists.

Among the races who are thus gifted are the despised, and, as I confidently maintain from personal knowledge of them, the much underrated Bushmen of South Africa. They are no doubt deficient in the natural instincts necessary to civilization, for they detest a regular life, they are inveterate thieves, and are incapable of withstanding the temptation of strong drink. On the other hand, they have few superiors among barbarians in the ingenious methods by which they supply the wants of a difficult existence, and in the effectiveness and nattiness of their accoutrements. One of their habits is to draw pictures on the walls of caves, of men and animals, and to color them with ochre. These drawings were once numerous, but they have been sadly destroyed by advancing colonization, and few of them, and, indeed, few wild Bushmen, now exist. Fortunately, a large and valuable collection of fac-similes of Bushman art was made before it became too late, by Mr. Stow, of the Cape Colony, who has very lately sent some specimens of them to this country, in the hope that means might be found for the publication of the entire series. Among the many pictures of animals in each of the large sheets full of them, I was particularly struck with one of an eland, as giving a just idea of the precision and purity of their best work.

A small but interesting sheet of copies of Bushman drawings was presented by Colonel Moncrieff, C. B., of gun-carriage celebrity, to the Christie Collection, which is now incorporated with the British Museum. Many notices of them are to be found in Barrow's travels in South Africa, and elsewhere.

The method by which the Bushmen draw is described in the following extract from a letter written to me by Dr. Mann, the