The Sower Knows Not Who Will Reap, Thus He
Limits His Crop To His Bare Necessities.
The ethnology of Central Africa is completely beyond my depth.
The
natives not only are ignorant of writing, but they are without
traditions - their thoughts are as entirely engrossed by their daily
wants as those of animals; thus there is no clue to the distant past;
history has no existence. This is much to be deplored, as peculiarities
are specific in the type of several tribes both in physical appearance
and in language. The Dinka; Bari; Latooka; Madi; and Unyoro or Kitwara,
are distinct languages on the east of the Nile, comprising an extent of
country from about 12 degrees north to the Equator.
The Makkarika have also a distinct language, and I was informed in
Kamrasi's country, that the Malegga, on the west of the Albert lake,
speak a different tongue to that of Kitwara (or Unyoro) - this may
possibly be the same as the Makkarika, of which I have had no experience
by comparison. Accepting the fact of five distinct languages from the
Equator to 12 degrees N. lat., it would appear by analogy that Central
Africa is divided into numerous countries and tribes, distinct from each
other in language and physical conformation, whose origin is perfectly
obscure. Whether the man of Central Africa be pre-Adamite is impossible
to determine; but the idea is suggested by the following data. The
historical origin of man, or Adam, commences with a knowledge of God.
Throughout the history of the world from the creation of Adam, God is
connected with mankind in every creed, whether worshipped as the
universal sublime Spirit of omnipotence, or shaped by the forms of
idolatry into representations of a deity. From the creation of Adam,
mankind has acknowledged its inferiority, and must bow down and worship
either the true God or a graven image; or something that is in heaven or
in earth. The world, as we accept that term, was always actuated by a
natural religious instinct. Cut off from that world, lost in the
mysterious distance that shrouded the origin of the Egyptian Nile, were
races unknown, that had never reckoned in the great sum of
history - races that we have brought to light, whose existence had been
hidden from mankind, and that now appear before us like the fossil bones
of antediluvian animals. Are they vestiges of what existed in a
pre-Adamite creation?
The geological formation of Central Africa is primitive; showing an
altitude above the sea-level averaging nearly 4,000 feet. This elevated
portion of the globe, built up in great part of granitic sandstone
rocks, has never been submerged, nor does it appear to have undergone
any changes, either volcanic or by the action of water. Time, working
through countless ages with the slow but certain instrument of
atmospheric influence, has rounded the surface and split into fragments
the granite rocks, leaving a sandy base of disintegrated portions, while
in other cases the mountains show as hard and undecayed a surface as
though fresh from Nature's foundry.
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