ion found in
company with drawings and sculpture in high and low relief; some of their
sculptures, like the Wellendorff "Venus," are unusually well finished for
primitive man. So, too, the painting and carving of the Bushmen and their
forerunners in South Africa has drawn the admiration of students. The
Negro has been prolific in the invention of musical instruments and has
given a new and original music to the western world.

Schweinfurth, who has preserved for us much of the industrial art of the
Negroes, speaks of their delight in the production of works of art for the
embellishment and convenience of life. Frobenius expressed his
astonishment at the originality of the African in the Yoruba temple which
he visited. "The lofty veranda was divided from the passageway by
fantastically carved and colored pillars. On the pillars were sculptured
knights, men climbing trees, women, gods, and mythical beings. The dark
chamber lying beyond showed a splendid red room with stone hatchets,
wooden figures, cowry beads, and jars. The whole picture, the columns
carved in colors in front of the colored altar, the old man sitting in the
circle of those who reverenced him, the open scaffolding of ninety
rafters, made a magnificent impression."[63]

The Germans have found, in Kamarun, towns built, castellated, and
fortified in a manner that reminds one of the prehistoric cities of Crete.
The buildings and fortifications of Zymbabwe have already been described
and something has been said of the art of Benin, with its brass and bronze
and ivory. All the work of Benin in bronze and brass was executed by
casting, and by methods so complicated that it would be no easy task for a
modern European craftsman to imitate them.

Perhaps no race has shown in its earlier development a more magnificent
art impulse than the Negro, and the student must not forget how far Negro
genius entered into the art in the valley of the Nile from Meroe and
Nepata down to the great temples of Egypt.

Frobenius has recently directed the world's attention to art in West
Africa. Quartz and granite he found treated with great dexterity. But more
magnificent than the stone monument is the proof that at some remote era
glass was made and molded in Yorubaland and that the people here were
brilliant in the production of terra-cotta images. The great mass of
potsherds, lumps of glass, heaps of slag, etc., "proves, at all events,
that the glass industry flourished in this