ORIGIN OF THE FULANI 375 most opposite theories regarding the birthplace of their race.

We have already seen in the Tarikh-es- Soudan a description of the black Joloffs, which counted this people among the ''best of men," and very superior to "all other Fulani." Marmol, in describing a chief of this race who visited Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, tells us, it will be remembered, that he had a fine figure and was generally well made, also that he had a long and well-trimmed beard, and "did not appear to be a negro, but a prince to whom all honour and respect were due." In Mungo Park's day the distinction of the Tarikh between the JolofTs and "the other Fulani " had grown into a permanent distinction of race, and Mungo Park speaks of them as two peoples. He says, however, of the Joloffs, whom he praises as an active, powerful, and warlike race, that "their noses are not so much depressed nor the lips so protuberant as among the generality of Africans, although their skin is of the deepest black." In the case of this people, intermarriage upon the coast with purely negroid types had no doubt brought them to a near resemblance with negro peoples, but the Foulah strain was still of effect enough to make of them a people who were highly thought of by the white traders of the coast.

The Foulahs proper, whom Mungo Park distinguishes from the Joloffs, are, he says, "chiefly of a tawny complexion, with soft, silky hair and pleasing features." These Foulahs, like others scattered through the entire length of the fertile belt, were " much attached to a pastoral life," and had, he tells us, by the end of the eighteenth century " introduced themselves into all the kingdoms on the windward coast as herdsmen and husbandmen, paying a tribute to the sovereign of the country for the lands which they held." The same pastoral Fulani migrated, as we have seen, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the Haussa States and Bornu, and paid tribute to the reigning kings of Kano and other towns.