Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/195

Rh decline in culture. This information is, however, very hard to get.

Livingstone's remarks on the Bakalahari of South Africa show us a race which has fallen in civilization, but this fall has happened, partly or wholly, through causes acting from without. The great Kalahari desert is inhabited by two races, the Bushmen, who were perhaps the first human inhabitants of the country, and who never cultivate the soil, or rear any domestic animals but dogs, and the Ba-Kalahari, who are degraded Bechuanas. These latter are traditionally reported to have once possessed herds of cattle like the other Bechuanas, and though their hard fate has forced them to live a life much like that of the Bushmen, they have never forgotten their old ways. They hoe their gardens annually, though often all they can hope for is a supply of melons and pumpkins. And they carefully rear small herds of goats, though Livingstone has seen them obliged to lift water for them out of small wells with a bit of ostrich egg-shell, or by spoonfuls. This remarkable account brings out strongly the manful struggle of a race which has been brought down by adverse circumstances, to keep up their former civilization, while the Bushmen, who, for all we know, may never have been in a higher condition than they are now, make no such effort. If we may judge these two races by the same standard, the Bushmen are either no lower than they have ever been, or if they have come down from a condition approaching that of the Bechuanas, the process of degradation must indeed have been a long one.

Tribes who are known to have once been higher in the scale of culture than they are now, are to be met with in Asia. Some of the coast Tunguz live by fishing, though they are still called Orochi, which is equivalent to the term "Reindeer Tunguz." No doubt the tradition is true of the Goldi that, though they have no reindeer now, they once had, like the Tunguz tribes north of the Amur. There are Calmucks north of the Caspian who have lost their herds of cattle and degenerated into fishermen. The richest of them has still a couple of cows. They look upon horses, camels, and sheep as strange and