"Mr. F. Galton would refer first to the purely ethnological part of the memoir, which dwelt upon the difficulty of defining the Bantu race. He thought that ethnologists were apt to look upon race as something more definite than it really was. He presumed it meant no more than the average of the characteristics of all the persons who were supposed to belong to the race, and this average was continually varying. The popular notion seemed based upon some idea like that of a common descent of the different races, from a parent Noachian stock, whence the aborigines of each county were derived, and where they lived in unchanged conditions till the white man came. Nothing can be further from the truth. We know how in South Africa the Bantu population has been in constant seethe and change; how, in much less than a single century, Chaka and his tribe, Mosilekatse and his tribe, and others, have in turn become prominent nations, and the average of the whole Bantu population must thereby have differed at different times. This same fluctuation of the average qualities of the population must, for anything we can see to the contrary, have gone on for many thousands of years. He therefore thought the phrase of Bantu race, as signifying some invariable and definite type, to be a mere chimera."