Page:The rising son, or, The antecedents and advancement of the colored race (IA risingsonthe00browrich).pdf/83

 living somewhat as they had in the country of their ancestors.

Kolben, who saw the Hottentots in the day of their prosperity, enumerates eighteen tribes of the race. The European colonists hunted these tribes as they would hunt beasts of prey. Most of them they exterminated, and seized upon their possessions; the rest they robbed and drove into forests and deserts, where their miserable descendants exist as wandering Bushmen, exhibiting to good Christian people material for most edifying studies in "anatomy and ethnology."

There is an immense region, comprising the greater part of interior Africa, two thousand miles in length, and one thousand in breadth, nearly equal to the whole of the United States, which has seldom been trodden by the foot of the Caucasian. It spreads out beneath the tropics, and is supposed by Humboldt to be one of the most interesting and fertile regions on the face of the earth.

"It must be," he says, "a high table-land, rising into the cooler strata of the atmosphere, combining therefore the qualities of the tierra caliente of Mexico, with its 'cloudless ethers,' the luxuriant slopes of the Andes, and the pastoral plains of Southern Asia. It cannot be a sandy desert, though sometimes put down as such upon the maps, because vast rivers come rolling down from it into the surrounding seas."

It has long been the land of romance, mystery, and wonder, and of strange and tantalizing rumors. The "blameless Ethiopians" of Homer, the favorites of the gods, and the wonderful Macrobians of Herodotus, are placed by Heeren on the outskirts of this region, where they would be most likely to be offshoots from its