OCR Rendition - approximate

Relations between Civilized and Savage Life. 327 Bushmen.-The following is the usual, and, as far as I was able to judge, accurate description of the Bushman race:Small stature, 42 feet being rarely exceeded; dirty yellowcoloured complexion ; Mongolian type of face ; cheek-bones prominent, eyes deeply set; nose small and depressed ; hair in woolly tufts ; hollow back, protruding stomach ; thick hinder parts ; small limbs, and very small hands and feet. Habitations-rocks, rarely huts ; no cattle, and few dogs ; arms bows and poisoned arrows. No tribal unity. No chiefs. Language, monosyllabic, abounding in clicks, and having no numerals beyond two. That the Bushmen proper are rapidly disappearing admits, I fear, of no doubt; but even in their case I have found generally much error in the popular estimates of their numbers, or even their continued existence. In their wild state, every man's hand is against them, and up to the present time we hear hideous tales of their sufferings, and their being shot like wild beasts, and being reduced by want of food to cannibalism, in the difficult border-country where they still continue to live at large, in rocky and barren places, and in the thick bush which fills the ravines in the lower part of the Orange River and its tributaries. As the large game disappears they are more often reduced to feed on the smaller wild animals, and even on reptiles and insects, the larger grasshoppers, and locusts, and ants affording them a frequent meal, and they are charged with occasional cannibalism in seasons of great scarcity. They are naturally unable to resist the temptation of stealing the sheep and cattle of the frontier colonists, and this propensity, joined to their reputation for using poisoned arrows, has so steeled the hearts of many border farmers, that to shoot a wild Bushman is hardly regarded as a crime in any but a strict legal sense. Time does not admit of more than a passing allusion to their most interesting, and, in a philological sense, most important language; their marvellously spirited and accurate cave paintings and rock sculptures, and their utensils and weapons which have frequently a special interest as illustrating the use of stone concurrently with metal. Thus to pick up the surface of the soil, and prepare it for sowing, they still occasionally use a sharpened stick loaded with a round ball of stone at the thicker end, to give it weight and impetus ; they still sometimes use arrows armed with neatly formed flint splinters, and I was told by a Damaraland trader, that he found in one place the Bushmen were frequent purchasers at the trader's wagon or store of bottles of cheap German scent. He enquired the object of such an unexpected taste, and found that the Bushmen had discovered