Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/500



is exceedingly interesting to compare the ideas of the Negroes with those of the Bantu. At present I have a more definite knowledge of the former, but I have gained sufficient knowledge of the West Coast Bantu to be able to commence a regular comparative study of these two analogous, but by no means identical, sets of ideas.

I fancy you find the earliest forms, both of religion and witchcraft, among the negroes, and I hope in some future sojourn on the Bantu border-line to work up the subject more thoroughly, for it is one of great interest to the student of mental evolution.

The mental condition of the lower forms of both races seems very near the other great border-line that separates man from the anthropoid apes, and I believe that if we had the material, or rather if we could understand it, we should find little or no gap existing in mental evolution in this old, undisturbed continent of Africa.

There is one point in evolution, and one only, on which I am a little heterodox, and that is the dogma that all human beings came in the beginning from a single pair, appearing somewhere in Asia, and that their descendants then migrated about the earth accustoming themselves, their religion, their cooking, and their culture to new environments, turning the while all sorts of colours, and developing peculiarities of no