THE BOSJEMANS.
A very singular and interesting group of savages is exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly—two men, two women, and a baby, of the Bosjeman tribes diminutive race of South Africa. The physical charac- ter of these people is unlike that of any nation with which we are acquainted; and certainly it tends to strengthen impressions as to the existence of sepa- rate races of mankind. The most diminutive of all known races, less even than the Savoyard of the Alpine vallies, it is unlike the Negro of Africa in many respects, and is not so "low in the scale of creation " as the Aboriginal Australian. At first the Bosjeman appears to stand half way between the man and the brute. He is very diminutive. His skin is not black, nor even very dark; but copper-coloured; or rather it nearly approaches to the colour of the skins that that he wears. The forms are far less rounded than in the Negro; the sides of the face, and its front also, being very fiat; the nose is excessively flat and skinny. The limbs are not ill proportioned, nor emaciated, but are spare: they are bone, muscle, and skin, with slight deposit of fat. The form of the skeleton is not unlike that of a sturdy boy; for although the legs are not much if at all " knock-kneed," the short femoral bone makes a considerable bend inwards from the projecting great trochanter. The arms are very long. The chest, so far as could be ob- served through the rude dress of skins, is contracted and narrow. The feet are short and clumped, the toes somewhat retracted, the skin of the sole thickened into a pad. The form of one man, the younger—who was full of wild animation—is much like that of a lad, arrested in growth at the stage of adolescence, and clothed with the scanty but well-marked muscles of an old man. The man's wife, also young, exhibits the most of what may perhaps be deemed plump and pretty among her own tribe. She is loquacious, and looks goodhumoured. The elder woman, who is about fifty years of age, is a miserable scarecrow. Of the elder man we could see little, as he sat in sulks; some one having given sixpence to the younger woman, while the elder obtained only copper. The child is com- paratively fair, and the peculiar traits of its race are all mitigated in its form: its nose is not in proportion nearly so depressed; and altogether the baby is not very much unlike a dingy and underbred European child. Here one recognizes the common type of humanity: the adults are un- developed children, stricken with senility while their forms are still im- mature. The man's voice is not disagreeable; but though loud it is boy- ish, deficient in volume, and devoid of manly gruffness. The language is very peculiar. Three of the consonants, we observed, consisted of these sounds—the noise made by the lips in slightly kissing, as when you kiss your hand; that made by smacking the tip of the tongue against the palate, as you do when tasting a flavour, or as some women do when they express petty vexation; and the clucking noise made with the hinder part of the tongue against the palate to urge a horse or assemble poultry: these three sounds, especially the two former, are consonants of rather frequent recur- rence. A vowel sound, often repeated, resembles the French en, but uttered from the chest with the coarse sing-song drawl of a boy driving away birds. The language is as rude and undeveloped, in sound at least, as the physical conformation of the people. It is unfortunate that the exhibitors do not understand the language of their savage wards. Still this aberrant speci- men of mankind is well worth examination, not only by the curious at large, but by the student of ethnology and physical geography.
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