uthern
world, to which south-eastern Asia furnishes a natural approach. The
negroes did not have Africa, that is, Africa south of the Sahara, all
to themselves. In and near the equatorial forest-region of the west
the pure type prevails, displaying agricultural pursuits such as the
cultivation of the banana, and, farther north, of millet, that must
have been acquired before the race was driven out of the more open
country. Elsewhere occur mixtures of every kind with intrusive
pastoral peoples of the Mediterranean type, the negro blood, however,
tending to predominate; and thus we get the Fulahs and similar stocks
to the west along the grassland bordering on the desert; the Nilotic
folk amongst the swamps of the Upper Nile; and throughout the eastern
and southern parkland the vigorous Bantu peoples, who have swept the
Bushmen and the kindred Hottentots before them down into the desert
country in the extreme south-west. It may be added that Africa has
a rich fauna and flora, much mineral wealth, and a physical
configuration that, in respect to its interior, though not to its
coasts, is highly diversified; so that it may be doubted whether the
natives have reached as high a pitch of indigenous culture as the
resources of the environment, considered by itself, might seem to
warrant. If the use of iron was invented in Africa, as some believe,
it would only be another proof that opportunity is nothing apart from
the capacity to grasp it.

Of the Australian aborigines something has been said already. Apart
from the Negrito or Negro strain in their blood, they are usually held
to belong to that pre-Dravidian stock represented by various jungle
tribes in southern India and by the Veddas of Ceylon, connecting links
between the two areas being the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and East
Sumatra, and the Toala of Celebes. It may be worth observing, also,
that pre-historic skulls of the Neanderthal type find their nearest
parallels in modern Australia. We are here in the presence of some
very ancient dispersal, from what centre and in what direction it is
hard to imagine. In Australia these early colonists found pleasant,
if somewhat lightly furnished, lodgings. In particular there were no
dangerous beasts; so that hunting was hardly calculated to put a man
on his mettle, as in more exacting climes. Isolation, and the
consequent absence of pressure from human intruders, is another fact
in the situation. Whatever the causes, the net r