lour
is a deep transparent black, and who have woolly hair, are robust and
well made, and have regular features. Their countenances, he says, are
ingenuous, and inspire confidence: they are honest, hospitable,
generous, and faithful. The women are mild, very pretty, well made,
and of agreeable manners. On the other side of the equinoctial line,
the Congo Negroes, as Pigafetta declares, have not thick lips or ugly
features; except in colour they are very like the Portuguese. Kafirs
in South Africa frequently resemble Europeans, as many late travellers
have declared. It has been the opinion of many that the Kafirs ought
to be separated from the Negroes as a distinct branch of the human
family. This has been proved to be an error. In the conformation of
the skull, which is the leading character, the Kafirs associate
themselves with the great majority of woolly African nations.[642]

THE NEGROES.

The Negroes inhabit Africa from the southern margin of the Sahara as
far as the territory of the Hottentots and Bushmen, and from the
Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, although the extreme east of their
domain has been wrested from them by intrusive Hamites and Semites.
Most negroes have high and narrow skulls. According to Welcker the
average percentage of width begins at 68 and rises to 78. The
variations are so great that, among eighteen heads from Equatorial
Africa, Barnard Davis found no less than four brachyrephals. In the
majority dolichocephalism is combined with a prominence of the upper
jaw and an oblique position of the teeth, yet there are whole nations
which are purely mesognathous. It is to be regretted that in the
opinion of certain mistaken ethnologists, the negro was the ideal of
every thing barbarous and beast-like. They endeavoured to deny him any
capability of improvement, and even disputed his position as a man.
The negro was said to have an oval skull, a flat forehead, snout-like
jaws, swollen lips, a broad flat nose, short crimped hair, falsely
called wool, long arms, meagre thighs, calfless legs, highly elongated
heels, and flat feet. No single tribe, however, possesses all these
deformities. The colour of the skin passes through every gradation,
from ebony black, as in the Joloffers, to the light tint of the
mulattoes, as in the Wakilema, and Barth even describes
copper-coloured negroes in Marghi. As to the skull in many tribes, as
in the above mentioned Joloffers, the jaws are not prominent, and the
lips