Note 1 — INTRODUCTION

Among the mass of interesting topics dealt with in Mr Hobley’s book it is difficult to single out any for special mention in an introduction. The subjects to which, on the whole, he has paid closest attention are natural religion and magic. In respect of religion the author again and again notes the remarkable similarities which may be traced between East African and Semitic beliefs and rites, and he raises the question how these similarities are to be explained. Are they due to parallel and independent development in the African and the Semitic races? Or are they the consequence of the invasion of Africa either by a Semitic people or at all events by a people imbued with the principles of Semitic religion. In my book “Folk-lore in the Old Testament”1 I had been similarly struck by some of these resemblances, and, while abstaining from speculation on their origin, had remarked that the hypothesis of derivation from a common source was not to be lightly rejected. On the other hand Mr Hobley thinks it safer, in the present state of our knowledge, to assume that the resemblances in question have arisen independently, through parallel development, in the African and Semitic areas. He dismisses as highly improbable the idea that the ancient Semitic beliefs should have originated in East Africa and spread from there to Arabia. Yet recent investigations in this part of Africa, particularly with regard to the native veins of iron and gold, tend in the opinion of some competent inquirers to show that East Central Africa, including the region of the great lakes, was an extremely ancient seat of a rudimentary civilisation, the seeds of which may have been carried, whether by migration or the contact of peoples, to remote parts of Europe and Asia. In regard to iron, which has been wrought in Central Africa from time immemorial, Mr Hobley quotes Professor Gregory who thinks it probable that the art of forging the metal was invented in tropical Africa at a date before Europe had attained to the discovery and manufacture of bronze; he even suggests that the ingenious smith who first fused tin and copper into bronze may have borrowed the hint from the process of working iron which he had learned in Africa.