Frobenius has recently directed the world’s attention to art in West Africa.  Quartz and granite he found treated with great dexterity.  But more magnificent than the stone monument is the proof that at some remote era glass was made and molded in Yorubaland and that the people here were brilliant in the production of terra-cotta images.  The great mass of potsherds, lumps of glass, heaps of slag, etc., “proves, at all events, that the glass industry flourished in this locality in ages past.  It is plain that the glass beads found to have been so very common in Africa were not only not imported, but were actually manufactured in great quantities at home.”

The terra-cotta pieces are “remains of another ancient and fine type of art” and were “eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy of form, and practically a reminiscence of the ancient Greeks.”  The antique bronze head Frobenius describes as “a head of marvelous beauty, wonderfully cast,” and “almost equal in beauty and, at least, no less noble in form, and as ancient as the terra-cotta heads."[64]

In a park of monuments Frobenius saw the celebrated forge and hammer:  a mighty mass of iron, like a falling drop in shape, and a block of quartz fashioned like a drum.  Frobenius thinks these were relics dating from past ages of culture, when the manipulation of quartz and granite was thoroughly understood and when iron manipulation gave evidence of a skill not met with to-day.

Even when we contemplate such revolting survivals of savagery as cannibalism we cannot jump too quickly at conclusions.  Cannibalism is spread over many parts of Negro Africa, yet the very tribes who practice cannibalism show often other traits of industry and power.  “These cannibal Bassonga were, according to the types we met with, one of those rare nations of the African interior which can be classed with the most esthetic and skilled, most discreet and intelligent of all those generally known to us as the so-called natural races.  Before the Arabic and European invasion they did not dwell in ‘hamlets,’ but in towns with twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, in towns whose highways were shaded by avenues of splendid palms planted at regular intervals and laid out with the symmetry of colonnades.  Their pottery would be fertile in suggestion to every art craftsman in Europe.  Their weapons of iron were so perfectly fashioned that no industrial art from abroad could improve upon their workmanship.  The iron blades were cunningly ornamented with damascened copper, and the hilts artistically inlaid with the same metal.  Moreover, they were most industrious and capable husbandmen, whose careful tillage of the suburbs made them able competitors of any gardener in Europe.  Their sexual and parental relations evidenced an amount of tact and delicacy of feelings unsurpassed among ourselves, either in the simplicity of the country or the refinements of the town.  Originally their political and municipal