THE SOUDAN CLOSED 317 beginning when God created things he added to everything its second." '* * I go to Syria,' said Reason ; ' I go with you/ said Rebellion. * I go to Egypt,' said Abundance; 'I accompany you,' said Submission. 'I go to the desert,' said Poverty ; ' I will go with you,' said Health." Barren though it was, the reputation of the desert which lay to the north had been a reputation of health from time immemorial. It had its dangers, but all that escaped from them alive was the better for the experience. For those who knew how to traverse it, its sands were but as the sea, and its edges were the most favoured portions of the Soudan. In proportion as the fertile belt receded from the desert it became unhealthy and unsuitable to the habitation of the higher races.

I have tried to show that, through the whole of the history of these higher races, their tendency had been to drive southwards before them everything that was weak or degraded or outworn. All the lower human types to be met with in the country went southwards into the equatorial belt, where frequent rain and the swampy overflow of rivers running to the coast develops a malarial climate unsuitable to higher activities. In the early tradition, quoted by Herodotus, pigmy races seem to have inhabited the country of the Middle Niger. At the present day they are to be found in the regions of the Congo. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the cannibal belt extended along the northern slopes of the Kong Mountains to about 12° north latitude. Now, though there are some exceptions, it is rare to find cannibals north of 7°, and the southern base of the Kong Mountains may be taken as the limit of habitation of the pure negro.

The movements of religion will, I think, be proved, when research has obtained clearer results than can now be securely claimed, to have corresponded to the movements of race. Fetishism, which is now to be met with chiefly in the strip lying between the Kong Mountains