a deep transparent black, and who have woolly hair, are robust and well made, and have regular features.  Their countenances, he says, are ingenuous, and inspire confidence:  they are honest, hospitable, generous, and faithful.  The women are mild, very pretty, well made, and of agreeable manners.  On the other side of the equinoctial line, the Congo Negroes, as Pigafetta declares, have not thick lips or ugly features; except in colour they are very like the Portuguese.  Kafirs in South Africa frequently resemble Europeans, as many late travellers have declared.  It has been the opinion of many that the Kafirs ought to be separated from the Negroes as a distinct branch of the human family.  This has been proved to be an error.  In the conformation of the skull, which is the leading character, the Kafirs associate themselves with the great majority of woolly African nations.[642]

THE NEGROES.

The Negroes inhabit Africa from the southern margin of the Sahara as far as the territory of the Hottentots and Bushmen, and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, although the extreme east of their domain has been wrested from them by intrusive Hamites and Semites.  Most negroes have high and narrow skulls.  According to Welcker the average percentage of width begins at 68 and rises to 78.  The variations are so great that, among eighteen heads from Equatorial Africa, Barnard Davis found no less than four brachyrephals.  In the majority dolichocephalism is combined with a prominence of the upper jaw and an oblique position of the teeth, yet there are whole nations which are purely mesognathous.  It is to be regretted that in the opinion of certain mistaken ethnologists, the negro was the ideal of every thing barbarous and beast-like.  They endeavoured to deny him any capability of improvement, and even disputed his position as a man.  The negro was said to have an oval skull, a flat forehead, snout-like jaws, swollen lips, a broad flat nose, short crimped hair, falsely called wool, long arms, meagre thighs, calfless legs, highly elongated heels, and flat feet.  No single tribe, however, possesses all these deformities.  The colour of the skin passes through every gradation, from ebony black, as in the Joloffers, to the light tint of the mulattoes, as in the Wakilema, and Barth even describes copper-coloured negroes in Marghi.  As to the skull in many tribes, as in the above mentioned Joloffers, the jaws are not prominent, and the lips are not swollen.  In some tribes the nose is pointed, straight, or hooked; even “Grecian profiles” are spoken of, and travellers say with surprise that they cannot perceive anything of the so-called negro type among the negroes.