Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Native African Peoples IT is by no means true, as many seem vaguely to suppose, that?when Egypt is excepted?the Dark Continent is practically the exclusive domain of the Negro race. In addition to the very many tribes and varieties of savage and barbarian black men, there are, and always have been, important indigenous African white or Caucasic races. Despite the fact that these ethnological questions are fraught with interest, they are peculiarly seductive; and when once we allow ourselves entangled in their meshes escape is well-nigh impossible. However, we cannot evade the danger altogether, since the reader must have some outline of the relations of the African Negro tribes?from which our American stock was largely drawn?to their Caucasic neighbors. The most widely accepted theory of the formation of the Caucasic race?for it is but a theory?is that it was first formed from the primitive stock somewhere in the north of Africa; probably in that vast plateau which at present consists of arid sand wastes, ?the great desert of Sahara?for, as we have seen elsewhere, this was certainly one of the most favored regions of the earth during hundreds of thousands of years. This white, or Caucasic people early became differentiated into two famous subdivision: the Semites and the Hamites. The Semitic branch is supposed to have subsequently passed over the Red Sea into Arabia, there to become still further specialized and to have given off various tribes intoother portions of Southwestern Asia; for the Semites who went out from Africa to constitute these races or varieties, are supposed to be the indigenous race of Arabia and certain other parts of Asia. The Hebrews or Jews, perhaps the most versatile of mankind, are also said to be a branch of this Semitic race. The Ar…
