374 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY for salt, which they dig from the pits in the great desert.

Describing them as a whole, ''They are," he says, "at once the vainest, the proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted, ferocious, and intolerant of all the nations of the earth." They had a very primitive system of justice and taxation, but they had ''neither dignity nor order." They lived in a condition of constantly plundering the negroes around them, and, like the nomad Berbers, they frequently roamed from place to place.

But the Moors did not fall from their high position in the Soudan without the interposition of another power. This time the dominating people, although not black, were, like the conquering races of Melle and of Songhay, of local origin. As the Moors declined, the Fulani rose.

This remarkable people, of whom mention is made in the earliest records which have been preserved of the history of the Soudan, have given rise to much learned controversy in the endeavours to determine to what branch of the human race they properly belong.

In the sixteenth century of our era, they may fairly be spoken of as being of local origin in the Soudan. At that time they knew of no other home, and there was record of their presence in the country for upwards of looo years. But they were of a race wholly different from that of the other races of the Soudan. Though profoundly modified by intermarriage, they counted themselves as a white people, and even when the mixed blood gave to their skin the prevailing colour of black or red, their features, their hair, their carriage, and their distinctive characteristics, proclaimed them of other than negro race.

The variations in their appearance are at the present day so marked — ranging from the jet black of the Joloffs of the western coast through "tawny," "white," and even " Syrian red " skins, to the blue-eyed individuals mentioned by Baikie as having been met by him upon the Benue — as to present arguments in support of the