^y
V
20 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY
within the memory of those who related the facts, or it may have been a tradition of much earlier events. In the incidents of the discovery there is an indication which the further history of Negroland supports, that the races which now inhabit equatorial regions further south, at one time extended towards the northern edge
of the fertile belt. The ** diminutive men," whose city existed on the middle Niger some hundreds of years before Christ, are presumably the dwarfs who in our own day were found by Stanley in the Congo forests. Their displacement illustrates the movement under the influence of which the aboriginal inhabitants of the fertile belt were pushed backwards towards equatorial Africa by that pressure of superior races from the desert of which
I have spoken. Greek historians of a later date than Herodotus establish the fact that between the purely black people known as the Western Ethiopians, and the Mauritanian inhabitants of the north-western corner of Africa, there were tribes, known as the Pharusii and the Nigretes, who used bows and arrows, and had chariots armed with scythes. The description of the Nigretes, who evidently knew at least the use of iron, would appear to imply a somewhat superior race occupying a position between the black dwarfs and the Northern Libyans. Thus it would seem that in quite ancient times the exist-
ence of different races within the belt of Negroland was established. There were evidently superior and inferior tribes ; and without attempting to follow the question in
detail, it is interesting, though not surprising, to observe that along the whole line of the fertile belt the superior races, modified by intercourse with the white pressure from the north, gradually established themselves in possession of the uplands bordering more nearly upon the desert and civilisation, while the inferior races were driven back towards the then impenetrable regions of barbarism and equatorial Africa. This movement of all that was inferior towards the south is a fact of supreme importance to the subsequent history of the Negro belt. \