OCR Rendition - approximate

322 SIR H. B. FRERE.-On the Laws affecting the How, after many generations of rest, after the fermentation of new ideas in religion, in politics, in commerce, and in all the arts of life, the inspiration of foreign adventure again pervaded the people of Western Europe, and directed the swarms of emigration to distant lands, would take long to tell. We must pass over the many valuable lessons to be gathered from the painful but instructive history of the contact between civilized and uncivilized races in America,- Spanish, French, Dutch, and English,-as well as in Polynesia and Africa, Australia and Australasia, up to our own time, and come at once to the more recent lessons afforded by our experience in our own day, and especially in Southern Africa, to which I would at present mainly confine my remarks. South African experience is, for many reasons, especially valuable in examining the present question, owing to the variety of races to which our experience relates. Of all these races I would remark that they seem to me to have been, when they first met with Europeans, descending and not ascending in the scale of civilization. None of them have any recorded history which could place the fact beyond the reach of doubt ; such evidence as exists must be sought in language and legend, and scanty traces of migration, but all races bear some traces of descent from ancestors in a higher state of civilization than their modern representatives were when we first heard of them. This is especially the case with regard to their language and to such differences as exist between early and late immigrations of the same race. 1. There are the races which have apparently most claim to be considered aboriginal. The " Red," or " Yellow skinned men,"-the tawny complexioned races : Hottentots, Bushmen, Namaquas, remarkable for their generally short stature, broad and prominent cheek-bones, and for their peculiar languages, which have given rise to a controversy, as yet unsettled whether their affinities are with the Coptic, Berber, Gall a, Ethiopic languages of Northern Africa, with the Finnish of Northern Europe, or whether they form a class apart, distinct from any yet known modern tongues. Time does not admit of our entering into the discussion, but all who could wish to pursue the subject further would do well to consult the excellent article on " Hottentots " by Mr. Noble, Clerk of the Legislative Council in Cape Town, which will be found in the new edition of the Bncyclopcedia Britannica now in course of publication, where the argument will be found summarised with reference to the authorities Wallman-the Doctors Hahn, three in number-Tindall, Bleek, Kronlein, and others who have written at length on the subject. Mr. Noble notes that the early Dutch travellers Kolben, &c., represent the Hottentots as mild, placable, ingenuous, affectionate,