22 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY
who count as a partly white race, is placed. The move-
ment of this remarkable people in Africa within historic time has unquestionably been from west to east, but this does not preclude the theory of some more remote eastern origin which may have preceded their African immigration. Whether Phoenician, Egyptian, Indian, or simply Arab, they are evidently a race distinct from the negroid and other black types by which they have been surrounded, and notwithstanding the marked effect produced on some portions of their people by intermarriage with negro women, they have kept the distinctive qualifications of their race through a known period of two thousand years. The Fulah of to-day is as distinct from the pure Negro as was the first Fulah of whom we have record. How
long they may have existed in Africa before any record of them was made it is with our present knowledge im-
possible to say. The Haussa and the Songhay are other races which, though black, are absolutely distinct from the pure negro type. ^ r In accepting as an historic fact the gradual migration southwards of all that was least valuable in the elements
composing the mixed and widely varying populations of the Negro belt, it is to be also recognised that this migration, though doubtless accentuated by the outside pressure of civilisation from the north, was a natural movement initiated by the native populations and carried on by them throughout the known period of their history.
Not only were the uplands bordering upon the desert the most desirable portions of the Negro belt, and as such likely to pass into the hands of the strongest who could
hold them, but, as they were also the healthiest, the races which inhabited them were maintained by climatic conditions on a higher platform of mental and moral activity than the more supine inhabitants of the denser tropical regions to the south. Hence every cause, natural and artificial alike, has combined to the one end, of establishing the superior races in the northern and the inferior races in the southern portions of the fertile belt.