d it, where they are now estimated
to number more than three millions.

[Footnote 16: _Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society_, vol.
i. This account of the routes of the Gypsies is by no means
universally accepted, nor, indeed, was offered as a complete
solution of the problem of their migration, but it will serve to
show how complex that problem is.]

It must not be supposed that emigration on a large scale implies
even a moderate degree of civilisation among those who emigrate,
because the process has been frequently traced among the more
barbarous tribes, to say nothing of the evidence largely derived
from ancient burial-places. My own impression of the races in South
Africa was one of a continual state of ferment and change, of the
rapid development of some clan here and of the complete or almost
complete suppression of another clan there. The well-known history
of the rise of the Zulus and the destruction of their neighbours is
a case in point. In the country with which I myself was familiar the
changes had been numerous and rapid in the preceding few years, and
there were undoubted signs of much more important substitutions of
race in bygone times. The facts were briefly these: Damara Land was
inhabited by pastoral tribes of the brown Bantu race who were in
continual war with various alternations of fortune, and the several
tribes had special characteristics that were readily appreciated by
themselves. On the tops of the escarped hills lived a fugitive black
people speaking a vile dialect of Hottentot, and families of yellow
Bushmen were found in the lowlands wherever the country was unsuited
for the pastoral Damaras. Lastly, the steadily encroaching Namaquas,
a superior Hottentot race, lived on the edge of the district. They
had very much more civilisation than the Bushmen, and more than the
Damaras, and they contained a large infusion of Dutch blood.

The interpretation of all this was obviously that the land had been
tenanted a long time ago by Negroes, that an invasion of Bushmen
drove the Negroes to the hills, and that the supremacy of these
lasted so long that the Negroes lost their own language and acquired
that of the Bushmen. Then an invasion of a tribe of Bantu race
supplanted the Bushmen, and the Bantus, after endless struggles among
themselves, were being pushed aside at the time I visited them by
the incoming Namaquas, who themselves are a mixed race. This is
merely a sample of Africa; ever