bably an imaginary aspect. The snow was
there, and plenty of it, but Rebmann died before justice was done to
his faithful labors. When Paul du Chaillu described the Obongo dwarfs of
West Africa, his narrative was discredited; but four or five groups of
dwarfs, probably numbering many thousands, are now known to be scattered
from the lower border of Abyssinia to the Kalahara desert in the far
south. The ancients had heard of the dwarfs, but the geographers of the
eighteenth century expunged from the maps of Africa about all that the
geographers of Greece and Rome, as well as those of later times, placed
on them; and the nineteenth century was slow in crediting the early
investigators even with statements that were wholly or approximately
accurate.

A curious history is connected with the discovery of the northeastern
group of pygmies, a little south of Abyssinia. No white man had ever
seen them, but about fifteen years ago Dr. Henry Schlichter, of the
British Museum, collected all the information which natives had given to
missionaries, traders, and explorers of the existence of these little
people some hundreds of miles from the sea. Sifting all this evidence,
he concluded that these dwarfs really existed, and that they lived in a
region which he marked on the map north of Lake Stefanie. Donaldson
Smith had not heard of Schlichter's paper, and knew nothing of these
dwarfs, but he found them in 1895 in the region which Schlichter had
indicated as their probable habitat.

The broadest generalization with regard to the African tribes is that
which separates most of the peoples south of the Sahara Desert into two
great groups,--the Negro tribes, whose habitat may be roughly indicated
as extending between the Atlantic and Gallaland in East Africa, with the
Sahara as their northern, and the latitude of the Cameroons as their
southern, boundaries; and the Bantu tribes, occupying nearly all of
Africa south of the Negroes. The distinction between these two great
groups is not based upon special differences as to physical structure,
mental characteristics, habits, or development, but depends solely upon
philological considerations, the languages of the Negroes and the Bantus
forming two distinct groups. Most of the slaves who were brought to our
country were Negroes, while most of those transported to Latin America
were from the Bantu tribes.

One fact that stood out above all others in the study of the African
natives, was th