Excerpt from Savage Man in Central Africa: A Study of Primitive Races in the French Congo "They are savages, in the same way that we say fruits are wild, which Nature produces of herself, and by her own ordinary progress." - Montaigne's Essays, Bk. I. ch. xxx, trans. Hazlitt. The last savage races are disappearing from the world's stage. The few survivors of primitive mankind behold the deterioration of their pristine customs, the vitiation of their artlessly unmoral natures, and the crumbling of their social order's ancient foundations under the rising tide of the European invasion, one-tenth of which is actuated by an enthusiastic desire to spread the blessings of civilization, nine-tenths by the attractions of money-making. Conquest is breaking the normal sequence of their history by an abrupt scission, down the gulf of which their past will soon disappear in the shades of oblivion. No time is to be lost if we would record what were the external and obvious forms of this past, and, more especially, its profound and psychological causes; for the centuries to come will be increasingly less qualified to understand the nature of primitive man. Many people feel naught but contempt for these barbarians, these backward brothers, outcasts of humanity, whose darkened intellect, incapable of complete development, repels sympathy, whose bestial habits excite disgust, and whose stupidity discourages any attempt at education. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.