ANCIENT EXPLORATION 153 dead were buried in their houses. All these constitute features which describe the Nilotic negroids of to-day.

Speaking of the extraordinary journey of the Nasamonians, Herodotus makes it clear that these ancient Libyan adventurers reached the Bahr-el-Ghazal and its morasses, at that time inhabited by pigmies who have now retreated to the Congo forests. Nero's centurions were the next r(icorded visitors, many hundreds of years later, and apparently reached the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes.

It is fairly to be inferred that the negroid races which inhabited Ethiopia then, remain to this day, and are generally in identically the same state of uncivilization that they existed in at the first dawning of history. The first mention of them in our earliest records speaks of the land as the " Ta-Nehesu," which has precisely the same signification as the name " Sudan," the " country of the blacks."

The enormous lapse of time which is involved as necessary to the development of such distinct types from a common ancestry is thus made a little appreciable.

Diodorus cuts the knot by stating that the Ethiopians were the first people who ever lived, so the idea of a black Eve, which makes one to shudder, must be debited to this worthy Greek !

But among the negroids there is also much classification. Those of the Sudan are greatly behind the tribes who have wandered southward.