there is a map taken from the Arabian work called 'Rasm,' which map was copied by Abu Diafar Mohammed Ben Musa, A.D. 883. This map is, therefore, 1000 years old, and on it the source of the Nile is represented as being in a lake called Kura Kavar, situated on the Equator, an island in it being represented as in longitude 30° 40' E. This exactly agrees with modern discoveries.

Reference was made in a recent number of the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society' to a passage of Seneca, in which that writer relates a conversation which he had with two centurions, who, in the early part of the reign of Nero, had been sent to search for the sources of the Nile. With the assistance of the King of Ethiopia and other chiefs, they, he says, to a great extent accomplished their task; but their further progress by water was found impracticable, when they reached the great jungles or marshes (immensas paludes), perhaps the Bahr el Ghazal, in which only a canoe containing one person could float. Seneca's further account of certain rocks out of or from between which the river was said to fall with great force is remarkable. He may either refer to the imaginary mountains which Herodotus mentions, or to the rush of the great stream from the Lake Nyanza, or from some point in its course of sufficient importance to justify partially if not entirely the imperfect description which he gives.

The principal modern explorations of the Nile have been that by Bruce, who confidently asserted and believed he had proved the Blue Nile to be the Great River of Egypt, and whose inquiries in the country of Darfur led him to place the source of the river at about 7° N. lat. and 27° long., not however in lakes, but in some stream flowing from the Djebel-el-Kamar, or Mountains of the Moon, the name which was given by Ptolemy to the great range in which he affirmed that the true source of the Nile would be found;-one by Linant, who travelled on behalf of the African Association in 1827, and surveyed the course of the White Nile from its confluence with the Blue River to Aleis, a distance of 132 geographical miles;-several modern expeditions, one under the direction of Ibrahim Kashef, an officer of the Viceroy of Egypt, who departed from Khartum, and dividing his party marched for thirty-four days along both banks of the White River without making any considerable progress or discoveries. Between the years 1839 and 1843, three expeditions were fitted out by the Egyptian Government for the exploration of the Nile,

*Nat. Quæst., Lib. 6.

and

and by which the river was followed up into regions previously unknown to the modern world. The first of these expeditions ascended the river as far as 6° 30′ N. lat., discovering in its passage the mouth of the Sobat, Lake No, and the Bahr el Ghazal; the second is alleged to have reached 4° 42' N. lat. ; the third did not get so far. The second of these expeditions was the most important. The officer in command was so much impressed by the appearance and magnitude of the Bahr el Ghazal that he would certainly have proceeded to explore that remarkable piece of water in preference to the Tubiri, conceiving it entitled by its importance to be considered the true Nile, rather than the river up which he continued his course; but his instructions were imperative to pursue his explorations to the south, whereas the Bahr el Ghazal would have taken him to the west or south-west.

Linant with a party of natives ascended the river as far as 13° 43' N. lat., but was unable to proceed in consequence of the native wars. The description which was given him of the country agrees with that which has since been derived from personal observation. The stream of the Nile was represented as being frequently lost in extensive lakes lying far to the west, and communicating with each other during the periodical inundations, the intervening country being flat. The observations which he himself made confirmed the truth of the description which he received. There was a total absence of gravel and sand in the bed of the river, which negatived the supposition that it could be fed by mountain streams; and its shoals and flats being composed of fine clay,* Linant conIcluded that it could not issue direct from any lofty region; or if its true source should really be in the Mountains of the Moon, it flowed after leaving them through a great extent of level country. One of the phenomena which it presented led him to the conclusion that it issued from or passed through some large lake; prodigious quantities of fish were observed carried down with the stream at the commencement of the freshes, and Linant rightly inferred that they could only come from a lake, from which they escaped as soon as the

rains and the annual inundation set in.

The position of the Nyanza had been imperfectly indicated to Captain Speke by the Arabs whom he met at Kazé, on his first

*The only sand in the White Nile is not brought down by the river, but blown there from the interior by the south-west winds.

visit

visit to the country. It was found to be separated from the Tanganyika by only 200 miles. The southern extremity was observed to be in 2° 30' S. lat., and its breadth there about ninety miles. It was fed by numerous streams which flowed from the mountain range which divided it from the Tanganyika, as well as by others, and by marshy rivulets which, supersaturated with water in the rainy season, overflow their banks and pour their contents into the lake. The existence of these great lakes in the interior of Africa had often been remarked upon by Sir Roderick Murchison, in his Addresses to the Royal Geographical Society; and he intimated the probability that the true centre of Africa is a great elevated watery basin, often abounding in rich lands, its large lakes being fed by numerous streams from adjacent ridges, and its waters escaping to the sea by fissures and depressions in the higher surrounding lands.' And here we cannot but express our satisfaction that the statements of the two enterprising German missionaries Krapf and Rebmann, which were received with so much suspicion, relative to the existence of great mountains covered with snow in this region of Africa, have been completely confirmed by the subsequent explorations of Baron C. von Decken and Mr. Richard Thornton, the former of whom ascended Kilimanjaro to the height of 13,000 feet to the snow-line. The rains at the Equator can scarcely be said ever to cease, but it is in April and November that they are heaviest, It is certainly a most beneficent arrangement that the configuration of Central Africa should be such as to cause the periodical expansion of its rivers into broad but shallow lakes, thereby supplying a great amount of moisture to the atmosphere, without which, in such a region, there could have been no organic life; equatorial Africa would otherwise, instead of a terrestrial paradise covered with a rich and luxuriant vegetation, and the home of millions of the human family revelling in material abundance and animal enjoyment, have been a scorched wilderness in which it would have been utterly impossible for man to subsist. The country on the Nyanza was found by Captain Speke, on his first visit, to be not only perfectly healthy, but abounding in all the necessaries of life. Coffee, the banana, numerous oleaginous plants, the pine apple, the ground-nut and cocoa-nut, rice, the cotton plant, were successfully cultivated, and the hills were covered with herds of fine cattle. During his first visit to the lake, Captain Speke received vague accounts of the Kitangulé and Kitonga, rivers flowing into it. A third large river to the north was described to

him;

him; it was said to be broader, deeper, and stronger than either the Kitangulé or the Kitonga, and to flow from the lake through stony, hilly ground in a north-westerly direction. This is doubtless the great river which Captain Speke has now seen, which the natives call the Kivira, and which he confidently denominates the Nile; and the hilly ground is the sandstone range which he describes as a characteristic feature of the scenery to the north-west of the lake. The conviction flashed upon his mind very soon after he had quitted the vicinity that this river must be the Nile. The height of the Nyanza having been ascertained to be upwards of 3500 feet above the level of the sea, and the bed of the Nile at Gondokoro, in latitude nearly 5° N., being greatly lower, Captain Speke arrived at the conclusion that the lake must be the reservoir of the Nile, and he conjectured that the cause why the ancient and modern exploring expeditions had failed to discover the Nyanza, was the existence of impassable rapids occasioned by the difference of elevation between the lake and Gondokoro. The intermediate country, Captain Speke inferred, was terraced like a hanging garden. He has since found its conformation to correspond precisely with that impression; and it is worthy of remark that the independent observations of travellers in Southern and Western Africa similarly reveal to us the existence of great rivers descending by steps from some central plateau.

The public will look forward with eager curiosity for the full details of Captain Speke's last great exploit and adventures, with a few of which he has already gratified his numerous audiences, who have listened at the cost of much bodily discomfort. It appears that returning to Unyanyembi, about 3° south of the Victoria Nyanza, and his former starting point, he and his companion took a new direction, which they were informed would conduct them to a creek on the western shore of the lake, whereas Captain Speke's first acquaintance with it was made nearly at its southern extremity. The track, however, did not lead direct to the Nyanza, but to a long valley called Orége, sloping down to the Nyanza, and presenting some of the appearances of the bed of a lake fast drying up. Captain Speke conceives the great Nyanza itself to have been formerly twice its present size, the surrounding country being covered with a network of rush-drains with boggy bottoms. But it seems to be the characteristic of several of the great African lakes to be subject to enormous periodical expansion and contraction, according to the amount of rain and evaporation to which they

are

are subjected. Thus the great lake Tchad was found by Dr. Barth to be an immense lagoon, and at the time of his visit to be only sixty miles in extent from east to west, although Clapperton had found it by rough measurement a few years before Barth's visit to be 120 miles long in the same direction. It may be therefore reasonably concluded that most of the lakes in the equatorial region of Africa are the expansions of large rivers swollen by the tropical rains. That is undoubtedly the case with the Tchad, and it may to a great extent be that of the Victoria Nyanza.

The size of the lake, however, must necessarily be much greater in the rainy season than in the dry, and the apparent traces of a great permanent diminution of its area may be only those of its periodical subsidences. It is scarcely conceivable that a lake so situated as the Nyanza, with the sources of its supply, by tropical rains and mountain streams, perennial, can have permanently decreased, to the extent supposed, from the effects of mere evaporation. Captain Speke recorded his first impres sion of this great sheet of water as being only the temporary deposit of a vast flood overspreading a flat surface. He believed it to be very shallow, as it was far from presenting the usual characteristics of a deep lake or inland sea, like the Tanganyika, but was studded with a multitude of wooded islands standing out of its surface like low hill tops, similar in their configuration to those of the country through which he had passed, and which would have presented exactly the same appearance as the Nyanza if subjected to a temporary inundation.* The recently discovered smaller lake, called by the travellers 'Little Windermere,' is, it appears, drained by the Kitangulé River into the Nyanza. This river, after receiving the contributions of many smaller streams, and draining some minor lakes, is described as a noble stream, almost equal in volume to the Nile itself when it first issues from the Victoria Nyanza.

Mashondé, in the upper region of the Uganda country, was the spot from which, in his second expedition, Captain Speke first obtained a view of the great lake. There is apparently reason to believe that the Nyanza is connected with some other lakes, for Captain Speke heard from the natives that they were in the practice of going to one in quest of salt by means of a strait, and he conjectures it may be the Baringo of

* Captain Speke's former exploration of the country of the Nyanza is recorded in three highly interesting papers contributed by him to Blackwood's Magazine,' in 1859.

Dr.