Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/537

Rh which we know to have taken place during the historical period also took place in prehistoric times and in unhistoric countries. Just as the English now colonize the coasts of the world, from Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, to South Africa, Canada, British Columbia, and Demerara, so the Phœnician and the Malay colonized in earlier times the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean, and so the Melanesian in a very remote past spread across the Pacific in the frailest of vessels. And just as the Goth and Hun and Tartar swept down in historic times on the Roman Empire or the Asiatic world, so, long before, unknown migrations and unnamed hordes of savages swept down upon Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. Nor the historic periods and places, we have documentary evidence; for the prehistoric or unhistoric, we have but the evidence of the existing and resultant arrangements.

Even these, however, tell us a great deal. What, for example, can be more curious than the existing diffusion of that tiny black "Negrito" race, with woolly hair and very protruding jaws, which is now in all probability the earliest surviving variety of the human species? These pygmies occur in Africa as the dwarfs of the forest country, the Akkas, Wochuas, and others, barely four feet high; as the Batwas and Bushmen of the south; and less pure, as the Hottentots. They crop up again in the undersized aborigines of the Andaman Islands of the Gulf of Bengal, in the Negritos of the Philippines, and in the small black Papuans. Hence we are justified in concluding that this widespread half-developed race of dwarfs once covered a large part of the southern world, from which it has now been ousted by newer, bigger, and more developed tribes; while the primitive pygmies hold their own best either in a few remote islands, in a few barren deserts, or else in very dense and pathless forests, through which taller races would creep with difficulty.

Not less interesting than these romances of race as race are the romances of the interaction of race and religion, or of race and culture. For example, the Moors of the towns and of the seacoast in North Africa, largely intermixed as they are with Arab and other Semitic blood, have swallowed Islam entire, adopting not only its religion but also its social order—its polygamy, its harems, its veiling of women. The Kabyles and Berbers of the hills, on the other hand, fairly pure descendants of the old native Mauritanian or Romanized inhabitants, though they have accepted Mohammedanism more or less fervently as a religious faith, have never really assimilated it as a social system. To this day they are practically strict monogamists; their women do not veil, but freely show their extremely pretty and piquant faces; while the family is organized on much the same basis as in Europe generally. In other words, the