Note 238 — APPENDIX E.

Only one ethnologist of the first rank—R. Hartmann—has spent any considerable time in the Sudan, and this was forty years ago. Except for his work we have to depend on (1) reports of officials and travellers: these are often very valuable, but the different criteria of race, language, etc., used by these writers make it very difficult to use them with any confidence; (2) the observations of “arm-chair savants” who base great theories upon stray skulls, fragmentary vocabularies, chance studies of natives touring about Europe “on show,” etc. This is not the place for a nice criticism of the respective values of these works.