The eminent anatomist Fritsch, in his valuable work on the natives of South Africa (386-407), describes the Bushmen as being even in physical development far below the normal standard.  Their limbs are “horribly thin” in both sexes; both women and men are “frightfully ugly,” and so much alike that, although they go about almost naked, it is difficult to tell them apart.  He thinks they are probably the aboriginal inhabitants of Africa, scattered from the Cape to the Zambesi, and perhaps beyond.  They are filthy in their habits, and “washing the body is a proceeding unknown to them.”  When the French anatomist Cuvier examined a Bushman woman, he was reminded of an ape by her head, her ears, her movements, and her way of pouting the lips.  The language of the Bushmen has often been likened to the chattering of monkeys.  According to Bleek, who has collected their tales, their language is of the lowest known type.  Lichtenstein (II., 42) found the Bushman women like the men, “ugly in the extreme,” adding that “they understand each other more by their gestures than by their speaking.”  “No one has a name peculiar to himself.”  Others have described them as having protuberant stomachs, prominent posteriors, hollowed-out backs, and “few ideas but those of vengeance and eating.”  They have only two numerals, everything beyond two being “much,” and except in those directions where the struggle for life has sharpened their wits, their intellectual faculties in general are on a level with their mathematics.  Their childish ignorance is illustrated by a question which some of them seriously asked Chapman (I., 83) one day—­whether his big wagons were not the mothers of the little ones with slender tires.

How well their minds are otherwise adapted for such an intellectualized, refined, and esthetic feeling as love, may also be inferred from the following observations.  Lichtenstein points out that while necessity has given them acute sight and hearing,

“they might almost be supposed to have neither taste, smell, nor feeling; no disgust is ever evinced by them at even the most nauseous kind of food, nor do they appear to have any feeling of even the most striking changes in the temperature of the atmosphere.”

“No meat,” says Chapman (I., 57), “in whatever state of decomposition, is ever discarded by Bushmen.”  They dispute carrion with wolves and vultures.  Rabbits they eat skins and all, and their menu is varied by all sorts of loathsome reptiles and insects.

No other savages, says Lichtenstein, betray “so high a degree of brutal ferocity” as the Bushmen.  They “kill their own children without remorse.”  The missionary Moffat says (57) that “when a mother dies whose infant is not able to shift for itself, it is, without any ceremony, buried alive with the corpse of its mother.”  Kicherer, another missionary, says