hile still nomads and addicted to hunting, they have
domesticated cattle and sheep and become essentially a herding people,
though mentally the lowest race of herders on the face of the earth.

With this change in habits, the Hottentots have significantly increased
in stature. While still of medium height, they are considerably larger
than their Bushmen kindred, to whom they present a close resemblance in
other respects. This increase in size is a common result of a change in
habits which insures a fuller supply of food with less strain upon the
muscular organization in obtaining it; a fact of which the lower animal
world is full of illustrations. The life of the forest and desert
hunters is one of incessant activity, and their food supply is
precarious. The Hottentots, on the contrary, take life easily and are
inclined to indolence, their herds supplying them with food in abundance
with little exertion. They retain enough of the primeval strain to be
fond of hunting, and while thus engaged display the activity of their
ancestral race, but ordinarily they pursue an idle, wandering life, and
their increase in size may well be a result of their change in habits.

The Hottentots, while still low in the human scale, are mentally a
stage in advance of the Bushmen, they having a more developed social
organization and superior powers of thought. The latter is indicated by
their myths and legends, of which they have a considerable store, though
they are in great measure destitute of religious conceptions, such
religion as they possess taking in great part the primitive form of
ancestor worship. Under the influence of Europeans they are gradually
abandoning their old habits and adopting those of civilized life, but
while improving in social and industrial conditions there is little
evidence of intellectual advance.

The development in method of food-getting displayed by the Hottentots
was really but the completion of the old battle for dominion with the
animal host. It consisted in subjecting some of the docile herbivora
more fully to human mastership. The hunter has to do with hostile
beasts, victims but not servants of man. The herder has reduced some of
these animals to servitude, and no longer has to overcome them through
the arduous labors of the chase. He is able to obtain, as we have said,
more food with less exertion, a larger population can live in a limited
district, and the beneficial effects upon the mind of a close