It remains to round off our original survey by a word or two more about the farther extremities, west, south, and east, of this vast southern world, to which south-eastern Asia furnishes a natural approach.  The negroes did not have Africa, that is, Africa south of the Sahara, all to themselves.  In and near the equatorial forest-region of the west the pure type prevails, displaying agricultural pursuits such as the cultivation of the banana, and, farther north, of millet, that must have been acquired before the race was driven out of the more open country.  Elsewhere occur mixtures of every kind with intrusive pastoral peoples of the Mediterranean type, the negro blood, however, tending to predominate; and thus we get the Fulahs and similar stocks to the west along the grassland bordering on the desert; the Nilotic folk amongst the swamps of the Upper Nile; and throughout the eastern and southern parkland the vigorous Bantu peoples, who have swept the Bushmen and the kindred Hottentots before them down into the desert country in the extreme south-west.  It may be added that Africa has a rich fauna and flora, much mineral wealth, and a physical configuration that, in respect to its interior, though not to its coasts, is highly diversified; so that it may be doubted whether the natives have reached as high a pitch of indigenous culture as the resources of the environment, considered by itself, might seem to warrant.  If the use of iron was invented in Africa, as some believe, it would only be another proof that opportunity is nothing apart from the capacity to grasp it.

Of the Australian aborigines something has been said already.  Apart from the Negrito or Negro strain in their blood, they are usually held to belong to that pre-Dravidian stock represented by various jungle tribes in southern India and by the Veddas of Ceylon, connecting links between the two areas being the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and East Sumatra, and the Toala of Celebes.  It may be worth observing, also, that pre-historic skulls of the Neanderthal type find their nearest parallels in modern Australia.  We are here in the presence of some very ancient dispersal, from what centre and in what direction it is hard to imagine.  In Australia these early colonists found pleasant, if somewhat lightly furnished, lodgings.  In particular there were no dangerous beasts; so that hunting was hardly calculated to put a man on his mettle, as in more exacting climes.  Isolation, and the consequent absence of pressure from human intruders, is another fact in the situation.  Whatever the causes, the net result was that, despite a very fair environment, away from the desert regions of the interior, man on the whole stagnated.  In regard to material comforts and conveniences, the rudeness of their life seems to us appalling.  On the other hand, now that we are coming to know something of the inner life and mental history of the Australians, a somewhat different complexion is put upon the state of their culture.  With very plain living went something that approached to high thinking; and we must recognize in this case, as in others, what might be termed a differential evolution of culture, according to which some elements may advance, whilst others stand still, or even decay.