w what he has been and may be expected to
become.

The native races are three, and the differences between them are marked,
being differences not only of physical appearance and of language, but
also of character, habits, and grade of civilization. These three are
the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and those Bantu tribes whom we call Kafirs.

The Bushmen were, to all appearance, the first on the ground, the real
aborigines of South Africa. They are one of the lowest races to be found
anywhere, as low as the Fuegians or the "black fellows" of Australia,
though perhaps not quite so low as the Veddahs of Ceylon or the now
extinct natives of Tasmania. They seem to have been originally
scattered over all South Africa, from the Zambesi to the Cape, and so
late as eighty years ago were almost the only inhabitants of Basutoland,
where now none of them are left. They were nomads of the most primitive
type, neither tilling the soil nor owning cattle, but living on such
wild creatures as they could catch or smite with their poisoned arrows,
and, when these failed, upon wild fruits and the roots of plants. For
the tracking and trapping of game they had a marvellous faculty, such as
neither the other races nor any European could equal. But they had no
organization, not even a tribal one, for they wandered about in small
groups; and no religion beyond some vague notion of ghosts, and of
spirits inhabiting or connected with natural objects; while their
language was a succession of clicks interrupted by grunts. Very low in
stature, and possibly cognate to the pygmies whom Mr. H.M. Stanley found
in Central Africa, they were capable of enduring great fatigue and of
travelling very swiftly. Untamably fierce unless caught in childhood,
and incapable of accustoming themselves to civilized life, driven out of
some districts by the European settlers, who were often forced to shoot
them down in self-defence, and in other regions no longer able to find
support owing to the disappearance of the game, they are now almost
extinct, though a few remain in the Kalahari Desert and the adjoining
parts of northern Bechuanaland and western Matabililand, toward Lake
Ngami. I saw at the Kimberley mines two or three dwarf natives who were
said to have Bushmen blood in them, but it is no longer easy to find in
the Colony a pure specimen. Before many years the only trace of their
existence will be in the remarkable drawings of wild animals with which
they delighte