Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Africa

For works with similar titles, see Africa.

AFRICA

This vast continent, though associated from the dawn of civilisation with traditions and mysteries of the most stimulating kind, has remained until recently one of the least known, and, both commercially and politically, one of the least important of the great divisions of the globe. The knowledge of Africa possessed by the ancients was very limited, owing principally to its physical construction. The great desert, which in a broad belt stretches quite across the continent, forbade every attempt to pass it until the introduction of the camel by the Arabs. The want of any known great river, except the Nile, that might conduct into the interior, contributed to confine the Greek and Roman colonists to the habitable belt along the northern coast. The Phœnecians are known to have formed establishments on the northern coast of Africa at a very early period of history, probably not less than 3000 years ago; and the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses dates as far back as the year B.C. 525. We may consider, therefore, the coasts of Egypt, of the Red Sea, and of the Mediterranean, to have been settled and well known to the ancient Asiatics, who were constantly passing the narrow isthmus which divided their country from Africa and led them immediately from parched deserts into a fertile valley, watered by a magnificent river. But whether they were much or little acquainted with the western coast, which bounds the Atlantic, and the eastern coast, washed by the Indian Ocean, is a question that has exercised the research and ingenuity of the ablest scholars and geographers, and has not yet been satisfactorily answered.

This question being one of curiosity rather than utility, we shall only state the case, and the results of the several inquiries, without entering into the merits of the arguments advanced by the different parties. We are told by Herodotus, that Necho, king of Egypt, sent out an expedition under the command of certain Phœnecian seamen, for the purpose of circumnavigating Africa; and that, on their return, they asserted that they had accomplished this undertaking. Few of the ancient writers give credit to the story; but, among the moderns, the Abbé Paris and Montesquieu have contended that this voyage was actually performed. Isaac Vossius and D'Anville have strong doubts; and Dr Vincent and M. Gosselin maintain that such an expedition, at such a period, exceeds all the means and resources of navigation, then in its infancy. Last of all comes Major Rennel, who, in his elucidation of the geography of Herodotus, has done more than all the rest in clearing away the doubts of history; and he argues the possibility of such a voyage, from the construction of their ships, with flat bottoms and low masts, enabling them to keep close to the land, and to discover and enter into all the creeks and harbours which any part of the coast might present. At all events, one thing is evident: if such an expedition ever circumnavigated the African continent, the fruits of it have nearly, if not entirely perished.

About half a century after this supposed expedition, the account of another voyage, down the western coast, is contained in the Periplus of Hanno, which has also called forth many learned and elaborate discussions among modern geographers, some of whom would carry Hanno to the Bight of Benin, others only to Sherbro Sound or the river Nun in lat. 28° N.

The extent to which ancient discovery proceeded along the eastern coast of Africa, has divided the opinion of the learned nearly as much as its progress on the western coast. Delisle, Huet, and Bochart, made the discovery of the coast to extend as far south as Mozambique and Madagascar. D'Anville could trace such discovery no farther than to Cape Delgado; and M. Gosselin contends that the ancients never proceeded down the coast beyond Brava. But Dr Vincent, who has entered more profoundly into the subject than any of his predecessors, and brought a great fund of learning to bear on the question, in his Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, has with great plausibility extended these boundaries to Mozambique and to the island of Madagascar.

Sketch Map of Africa.

Egypt, under the Ptolemies, the great patrons of science and promoters of discovery, possessing the advantage of the only great river which falls from the African continent into the Mediterranean, made no progress beyond its ancient boundaries; and though the Romans, who subsequently possessed Egypt, penetrated beyond the limits of their own dependencies, they extended their discoveries no further than Fezzan in one direction, and, at a later period, beyond Nubia as far as Abyssinia, and the regions of the Upper Nile. We know nothing of the progress made by the Carthaginians in the discovery of Interior Africa; but although it has been asserted that their merchants had reached the banks of the interior river, which we call the Kawara or Niger, they have left nothing on records that will warrant such a supposition. The story told by Herodotus, of some Nasamonians crossing the desert, and arriving at a large river, can only be applicable to some western arm of the Nile. The people from whom we derive the first information concerning the interior of Northern Africa are the Arabs, who, by means of the camel, were able to penetrate across the great desert to the very centre of the continent, and along the two coasts as far as the Senegal and the Gambia on the west, and to Sofala on the east. On this latter coast they not only explored to an extent far beyond any supposed limits of ancient discovery, but planted colonies at Sofala, Mombas, Melinda, and at various other places.

The 15th century produced a new era in maritime discovery. The voyages of the Portuguese were the first to give anything like an accurate outline of the two coasts, and to complete the circumnavigation of Africa. The discovery of America and the West India islands gave rise to that horrid traffic in African negroes, which has since been suppressed; but this traffic has been the means of acquiring a more extended and accurate knowledge of that part of the coast which lies between the rivers Senegal and the Cameroons, as well as of the manners and character of the people who inhabit this extended line of coast. With the English and French settlements in Africa began a systematic survey of the coast, and portions of the interior.

The uncertainty and confusion that prevailed in the geography of the interior of Africa induced a few learned and scientific individuals to form themselves into an association for promoting the exploration of Inner Africa. This society was formed in London in 1788, and under its auspices important additions were made to the geography of Africa by Houghton, Mungo Park, Hornemann, and Burckhardt. Repeated failures, however, at length discouraged the association from engaging other missionaries, and it subsequently merged in the Royal Geographical Society in 1831.

During the last sixty years more has been done to make us acquainted with the geography of Africa than during the whole of the 1700 previous years, since Ptolemy, taken together. With Mungo Park, strictly speaking, commences the era of unceasing endeavours to explore the interior.

Mungo Park proceeded in 1795 from the river Gambia on the west coast, to the Joliba (commonly called Niger), traced this river as far as the town of Silla, explored the intervening countries, determined the southern confines of the Sahara, and returned in 1797. In 1805 this adventurous traveller embarked on a second journey in the same regions, for the purpose of descending down the river Joliba to its mouth. This journey added little to the discoveries already made, and cost the traveller his life. He is ascertained to have passed Timbuktu, and to have reached Boussa, where he was killed by the natives. In 1798 Dr Lacerda, a scientific Portuguese traveller, who had already acquired fame through his journeys in Brazil, made the first great journey in South-Eastern Africa, inland from Mozambique, and reached the capital of the African king, known as the Cazembe, in whose country he died.

Hornemann, in 1796–98, penetrated from Cairo to Murzuk, and transmitted from that place valuable information respecting the countries to the south, especially Bornu. He then proceeded in that direction, but it is supposed that he soon afterwards perished, as no accounts of his further progress have ever reached Europe. The first actual crossing of the continent that has been recorded was accomplished between the years 1802 and 1806, by two Pombeiros or mercantile traders in the employment of the Portuguese, who passed from Angola eastward through the territories of the Muata Hianvo and the Cazembe, to the possessions on the Zambeze. In 1816 an expedition was sent out by the English Government, under the command of Captain Tuckey, to the river Congo, which was at that time believed to be the lower course of the Joliba. This was a disastrous understaking, and the geographical additions were but slight, the river having been ascended a distance of only 280 miles.

In 1819 Lyon and Ritchie penetrated from Tripoli to Murzuk, and a little distance beyond that place.

In 1822 Denham, Clapperton, and Oudney set forth from Tripoli in the same direction, crossed the Great Desert, and reached, on the 4th February 1823, the great lake Tsad or Chad. The surrounding countries were explored as far as Sakatu in the west, and Mandara in the south. This journey was altogether one of the most successful and important into the interior. Oudney died in Bornu, but Clappteron undertook a second journey from the coast of Guinea, crossed the Kawara, and arrived at Sakatu, at which place he also died. His servant, Richard Lander, returned to England, after having explored a part of the adjoining regions.

Major Laing succeeded in reaching Timbuktu from Tripoli, but was murdered on his return in the desert.

In 1827 and 1828 Caillié set out from the Rio Nunez on the western coast, reached Timbuktu, and returned from that place through the Great Desert to Marocco. A second Portuguese journey was undertaken in 1830 from Mozambique to the Cazembe's dominions, and Major Monteiro, the leader of the expedition, more fortunate than his predecessor Dr Lacerda, was enabled to complete a map of the country traversed, and to bring back a complete account of this portion of the interior.

The termination of the Joliba, Kawara, or Niger, remained in obscurity till 1830, when it was ascertained by Lander and his brother, who succeeded in tracing the river from Yaouri down to its mouth. They embarked on a second expedition, which sailed in 1832, for the purpose of ascending the Kawara as far as Timbuktu. But only Rabba was reached, and the general results of the expedition were most disastrous.

The great Niger expedition, similar to the foregoing, consisted of three steam-vessels, and was despatched by the Government in 1841, under Captain Trotter. It proved a failure, and resulted in a melancholy loss of life.

In the region between the Kawara and the coast, Mr Duncan, one of the survivors of the Niger expedition, made some additions to our geographical knowledge by his journey to Adafoodia, in 1845–46. This enterprising traveller met with an untimely death in a second attempt in the same region for the purpose of reaching Timbuktu.

The preceding journeys were confined chiefly to the northern and western portions of the continent. A much greater number of travellers explored the regions drained by the Nile, the salubrity of which, particularly of Abyssinia, is so infinitely greater than that of Western Africa, that among the many explorers of the former, a very small proportion have died as compared with the immense loss of life in Western Africa. Among the most distinguished of the earlier East African travellers are Bruce (1768–73), Browne (1793), who reached Darfur, Burckhardt (1814), Cailliaud (1819), and more recently Rüppel (1824–25), Russegger (1837), D'Abbadie (1838–44), Beke (1840–44), D'Arnaud and Werne on the White Nile (1840–42), and Brun Rollet (1845).

Though the Dutch settlement in South Africa was founded as early as 1650, not much information of the interior of that portion of the continent was gained till the end of the 18th century, when a series of journeys was commenced by Sparrmann, and followed up by Vaillant, Barrow, Trotter, Somerville, Lichtenstein, Burchell (1812), Campbell, Thomson, Smith, Alexander (1836–37), and Harris.

A station of the Church Missionary Society was established near Mombas, in about 4° S. lat. on the east coast of Africa, in 1845, and the zealous missionaries in charge of it began to make exploring journeys into the interior. Thus, early in 1849, the Rev. Mr Rebmann discovered the great snow-clas mountain of Kilima-njaro, rising on the edge of the inland plateau; and his companion, Dr Krapf, taking a more northerly route, came in sight of a second huge mountain named Kenia, also snow-clad, though directly beneath the equator. Frequent reports reached these missionaries of vast lakes in the interior beyond the mountains they had discovered, and their information awakened a great interest in this region at home.

About this time an embassy, for the purpose of conducting commercial treaties with the chiefs of Northern Africa, as far as Lake Chad, by which the legitimate trade of these countries should be extended and the system of slavery abolished, was originated by Mr James Richardson, who left England for this purpose in 1849, accompanied by Drs Barth and Overweg. The expedition had already almost reached the scene of its labours when Richardson died; Overweg also fell victim to his exertions, but Dr Barth continued his explorations till 1856. During this time he traversed in many directions almost the whole of the northern Soudan, completing a series of journeys which must always remain most conspicuous in North African travel, and upon which we are still dependent for the greater part of our knowledge of the central negro states.

In the summer of 1849, Dr Livingstone, who, as an agent of the London Missionary Society, had laboured and travelled in the countries immediately north of the Cape Colony since 1840, began those remarkable journeys in the interior of Southern Africa, which have continued until the present time, and have given to him the first place among African discoverers. The finding of Lake Ngami, the central point of the continental drainage of South Africa, was the great discovery of the first year.

Two journeys from the west coast now claim attention. In 1846 a Portuguese trader named Graça succeeded in again reaching the country of the South African potentate, named the Muata Yanvo, from Angola; he was followed by a Hungarian named Ladislaus Magyar, who explored the central country in various directions from 1847 to 1851. Between 1851 and 1853 Livingstone made two journeys northward from his station in the land of the Bechuanas, and was the first European to embark upon the upper course of the Zambeze. From the Makololo country, in the central part of the river basin, he now led a party of natives westwards up-stream to the water-parting of the continent at the little Lake Dilolo, and thence to the western slope, reaching the Portuguese coast at Loanda in 1854.

During 1851 Galton explored a part of the south-western country inhabited by the Damaras and Ovampo, from Walfisch Bay to a point in lat. 17° 58' S., and long. 21° E., determining accurately a number of positions in this region. On the south-east, also, Gassiot made an interesting journey from Port Natal north-westward through the mountains to the river Limpopo.

Two most remarkable journeys across the whole continent now follow in order; the one, made by Silva Porto, a Portuguese trader, who leaving Benguela in 1853, took an eastward route, parallel to but considerably northward of the Zambeze, over perfectly unknown country. He then rounded the southern end of the Lake Nyassa (afterwards explored by Livingstone), and made his way across the east coast-land to the mouth of the Rovuma river, having spent a year and two months in his tedious march. The other was executed by Livingstone, who in returning (1855–56) by a somewhat more northerly route than that travelled over in going westward to Loanda, descended the Zambeze to its mouth at Quilimane, discovering the wonderful Victoria Falls of the river on his way.

In 1856 an important addition was made to the more exact geography of Africa, in a survey of the greater part of the course of the Orange river, by Mr Moffat, a son of the veteran South African missionary.

The following year was one of great activity in African exploration. Damara Land, in the south-west, was traversed by Messrs Hahn and Rath as far as the southern limit of the Portuguese territory at the Cunene river; Dr Bastian was exploring the interior of Congo and Angola, and Du Chaillu had begun his first journey in the forest country of the Fan tribes on the equatorial west coast. Under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society, Captains Burton and Speke, already distinguished by their perilous journey to Harar, a trading centre in the Somali and Galla country of the east African promontory, set out from Zanzibar, to ascertain the truth about the great inland lakes which had been reported by the Mombas missionaries. Their most successful journey (1857–59) resulted in the discovery of Lake Tanganyika, in a deep basin, between 3° and 8° S. lat., and of the southern portion of a perhaps greater lake northward, supposed by Speke, its discoverer, to be the head reservoir of the Nile.

In a new journey in the Zambeze region in 1859, Dr Livingstone, accompanied by Dr Kirk, traced the Shire river, a northern tributary of the Zambeze, to its outflow from the Nyassa, the most southerly of the great African chain of fresh lakes.

About this time also several travellers (Petherick (1858), Lejean, Miani, the Poncets, Antinori, Debono, Peney) were adding much to the existing knowledge of the Upper White Nile from the Egyptian side; and in the north the Algerian Sahara was being explored by the French scientific traveller Duveyrier.

In 1860 Captain Speke, anxious to extend knowledge of the great inland reservoirs which had been discovered in his former journey, and to connect them with the known countries to northward, accompanied by Captain Grant, again left Zanzibar. Reaching a point on the north-western shores of the great lake which he had previously made known, and which he now named the Victoria Nyanza, the traveller thence traced the outflowing river to the White Nile at Gondokoro, thus completing a great link on the chain of African discoveries, which binds the country known from the east coast to that explored side the side of Egypt.

Meanwhile Dr Livingstone had endeavoured to find a way to his newly-discovered Lake Nyassa from the mouth of the Rovuma, a large river which to the Indian Ocean near Cape Delgado, and which was also reported to take its rise in this lake, but the river proved to be unnavigable beyond a point not far from the sea. He returned then (in 1861) to the Shire river; and, carrying a boat past its rapids, launched out to explore the whole length of Lake Nyassa.

A series of important journeys by Gerhard Rohlfs had now (1861) begun in Marocco and in the Maroccan Sahara; and on the equatorial east coast region, Baron von der Decken had extended Rebmann's information in the region of the snowy mountain, Kilima-njaro.

In the south the artist Baines had crossed the Kalahari Desert from Damara Land to the falls of the Zambeze. In 1862 Petherick made an important journey of exploration in the Nile region west of Gondokoro.

The year 1864 was marked by the discovery of a second great reservoir lake of the Nile, near the latitude of the Victoria Nyanza, by Baker, pushing southerward from Gondokoro. This lake the discoverer named the Albert Nyanza. During this year also, Rohlfs extended his travels from Marocco to the oasis of Tuat, thence making his way to Ghadames and Tripoli; in Western Africa, the officers of the French marine stationed at the Gaboon explored the delta region of the great Ogowai river; and Du Chaillu, in a second journey (1864–65), entered the gorilla country of Ashango, south of this river; whilst, on the east coast, Baron von der Decken attempted the navigation of the Juba, but was destined to fall a martyr to the jealousies of the Galla and Somali tribes, whose territories the river divides.

After a short stay at Tripoli, the traveller Rohlfs again turned southward, and in a journey which lasted from 1865 to 1867, crossed the whole northern continent—first reaching Lake Chad by almost the same route as that formerly taken by Barth, and thence striking south-westward by a new path to the Bight of Benin.

In 1866 some progress was made in discovery in the west, by the navigation of the Ogowai river by Walker, for 200 miles from its mouth. Hahn and Rath also extended their exploration of the Damara Land. On the eastern side Messrs Wakefield and New, the successors of Krapf and Rebmann in the Mombas Mission, made numerous short journeys in the Galla country, and the former collected very valuable native information respecting the countries lying between this coast-land and the great lakes of the Nile basin. In this year also Dr Livingstone had again entered the Rovuma river, beginning that greatest of all his journeys from which he has not yet (1873) returned, and the outline of which we shall notice further on.

Still farther south, in 1866–67, the discovery of gold in the mountains between the Zambeze and Limpopo rivers, by the pioneer Mauch, gave great impetus to exploration in this part of the continent. The years 1867–68 brought the memorable Abyssinian campaign, and the accurate records kept of the line of march on the high land from Massowah to Magdala formed a most valuable contribution to African geography.

Most important in the following years (1869–71) were the researches of the botanist, Dr Schweinfurth, in the region of the complicated network of tributaries received by the White Nile west of Gondokoro, during which he passed the water-parting of the Nile basin in this direction, and came into a new area of drainage, possibly belonging to the system of Lake Chad; and the outsetting of a great Egyptian military expedition (1869) by Sir Samuel Baker, for the purpose of exploration of the Upper Nile and of extermination of slave traffic on the river, and to plant Egyptian military posts in the regions visited.

The letter received from time to time in this country from Dr Livingstone enable us to trace roughly his movements from 1866 to the present time as follows:—Arriving from Bombay, on the East African coast, near the mouth of the Rovuma, he passed up the course of this river to the confluence of its main tributary branches, one coming from the north-west, the other from south-west. Following the latter arm, the traveller appears to have gone round the southern end of the Lake Nyassa, and, marching then in a north-westerly direction, he crossed the head waters of the Aruangoa tributary of the Zambeze, near the track of Lacerda, in the previous century; ascending a high land, he came upon a portion of the Chambeze river, belonging to a different basin, and continuing in a north-westerly direction, discovered Lake Liemba, a southern extension of Lake Tanganyika, in April 1867. Thence he turned to the Cazembe's town, and in journeys northward and southward from this point, made known the two great lakes, Moero (Sept. 1867), and Bangweolo or Bemba (July 1868), which form part of a new system, connected by the Chambeze (also named the Luapula and Lualaba) river in a basin south and west of that of the Tanganyika. In 1869 Livingstone had made his way to Ujiji, Burton's halting-place, on the eastern shore of the Tanganyika. Hence, crossing the lake, he penetrated the dense tropical forests and swamps of Manyuema country, in the heart of the southern portion of the continent, and during 1870–71 traced the vast river (Lualaba) flowing out of the Lake Moero, in its north and westerly course, to a second, and then a third great expansion—Lake Kamalondo the one, and the other a still unvisited body of water lying in about 3 S. lat., and 25 or 26 E. long; also learning, by native report, that the Lualaba (which is in all probability the upper course of the mighty Congo river) received a great tributary from south-westward. This south-western arm also expands into a vast lake, which Livingstone has named, in anticipation, Lake Lincoln.

Though the untruth of a report of Livingstone's death, near the Nyassa, had been proved by an expedition sent out on his track by the Geographical Society of London in 1867, yet, at the time of his Manyuema journey, the probable fate of the great traveller, from whom no news had com eout of Africa for more than two years, became a matter of the greatest anxiety among all classes in Europe and America. This led to a special mission for Dr Livingstone's aid, generously fitted out at the cost of the proprietor of an American newspaper. Stanley, the leader of this expedition, made a bold march from Zanzibar to Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, and was fortunate in meeting the great traveller there, returning from Manyuema, broken down by the severity of the task which he had accomplished, and in need of everything. A boat voyage round the northern end of Tanganyika, undertaken in the latter part of 1871 by Livingstone and Stanley together, proved that this great lake has no apparent outlet in northerly direction, and leaves the question of its drainage in considerable doubt.

Recruited in health, and supplied with stores and followers, Livingstone is believed to have started afresh from Unyanyembe, a point midway in the route from Zanzibar to Ujiji, where he parted with Stanley, in autumn of 1872, to carry out a projected journey, in which he will clear up all doubts respecting the ultimate direction of the great Lualaba river.

Of the expeditions which have been progressing in Africa contemporaneously with these later journeys of Dr Livingstone, that of Sir Samuel Baker is perhaps the most important, though its story has until now been one of almost continuous hardship and disaster. Up to the middle of the year 1870, at which time the expedition, consisting of upwards of 1500 men, with numerous vessels, had safely reached a point on the Nile in 9° 26' N. lat., all appears to have gone well; but beyond this the passages of the river had become choked with overgrowth of vegetation, and each yard of advance had to be cut through this living barrier; disease broke out among the troops, and the expedition was reduced to the greatest straits. In the end, however, it appears to have been completely successful, and before Sir Samuel Baker's return to Egypt in 1873, the whole country, as far south as the equator, had been taken possession of in the name of Egypt, and several garrisons had been planted to maintain the hold.

Knowledge of the rich country between the Transvaal Republic and the Zambeze has extended with wonderful rapidity, through the exertions of the pioneers Mauch, Mohr, Baines, Elton, and St Vincent Erskine, so that this region has now almost passed out of the category of lands in which geographical discoveries can be made. A point of great interest in the progress of the exploration of this country was the discovery by Mauch, in 1871, of the ruins of an ancient city or fortress, named Zimbaoe, certainly not of African construction, about 200 miles due west from Sofala, in lat. 20° 15' S., long. 30° 45' E., through which it has been sought to identify this region with the Ophir of Scripture. The finding, in 1869, of rich diamond fields in the upper valley of the Orange river, and in that of its tributary the Vaal, caused a rush of emigration to these districts, and tended still further to develop this portion of Africa.

North African exploration is also vigorously progressing. In the west, during 1869, Winwood Reade made a journey from Sierra Leone to the head of the Niger, and from 1867 onwards M. Munzinger, consul at Massowa, has greatly extended our knowledge of Northern Abyssinia. A notable journey of exploration in the Sahara remains to be mentioned. In 1869 Dr Nachtigal was appointed to carry presents from the King of Prussia to the Sultan of Bornu, on Lake Chad, in acknowledgment of that potentate's aid to former travellers. Besides accomplishing this mission, this explorer has added very considerably to our knowledge of the Eastern Sahara by investigating the central mountains country of Tibesti, hitherto only known by report; and in more recent journeys, still being continued, he has proved the existence of an outflowing river from Lake Chad, which has hitherto been believed to be a terminal lake, the freshness of its waters having on this account appeared an anomaly in physical geography.

With the double purpose of affording support to Dr Livingstone, and of adding to the geography of Equatorial Africa, two expeditions were fitted out by the Royal Geographical Society in 1872. One of these, led by Lieut. Cameron, was planned to follow to footsteps of Livingstone in his present journey from the eastern side, entering the country by the ordinary trade route from Zanzibar towards the Tanganyika. This expedition started from Zanzibar early in 1873, under the auspices of Sir Bartle Frere's mission, and has now made considerable progress towards the interior. The other, named the "Livingstone Congo Expedition," under Lieuts. Grandy, is to pass from the Expedition," under Lieuts. Grandy, is to pass from the west coast to the interior, by following the river Congo, which is almost without doubt the lower course of the great Lualaba river, about to be further explored by Dr Livingstone coming to it from the eastern side. The latest accounts from this expedition are also in the highest degree favourable, and an advance of upwards of 150 miles has already been made from Loanda. A new expedition, under the leadership of the indefatigable traveller Rohlfs, is now in preparation, and is destined to explore the unknown portions of the Libyan desert.

Thus the exploration of the great continent is slowly advancing year by year, but with earnest and unceasing progress. As yet the only portions of Africa of which we possess any approach to an accurate topographical knowledge are, the Cape Colony and Natal under British rule in the south, the French colony of Algeria, the Portuguese possession of Angola, and Egypt and Tunis, dependent on the Turkish Empire, in the north.

Throughout the rest of the continent, a network of routes accomplished by travellers gives in most parts the great outline of its features; where these lines interlace more closely, as in the South African Republics, and in Abyssinia, the general aspect of the land is now so well known as to preclude the possibility of any important geographical discovery there; elsewhere, however, the gaps between the tracks are wider. In the vast inhospitable region of the Sahara there are great areas still unknown to civilised man, and the equatorial region of dense forests in Central Africa is still one of the greatest terræ incognitæ of the globe.

The origin and meaning of the name of this great continent has been a fertile subject for conjecture among philologists and antiquaries. By the Greeks it was called Libya, Λιβύη, and by the Romans Africa. Varrio believed he had found the etymology of the former in Libs, the Greek name of the south wind; and Servius, the scholiast on Virgil, proposed to derive the other from the Latin word aprica (sunny), or the Greek word a-phriké (without cold). It is more probable that the name Libya was derived by the Greeks from the name of the people whom they found in possession of the country to the westward of Egypt, and who are belived to have been those that are called in the Hebrew Scriptures Lehabim or Lubim. With respect to the word Africa, Suidas tells us that it was the proper name of that great city which the Romans called Carthago, and the Greeks, Karchedon. It is certain, at least, that it was applied originally to the country in the immediate neighbourhood of Carthage, that part of the continent first known to the Romans, and that it was subsequently extended with their increasing knowledge, till it came at last to include the whole continent. Of the meaning of the name, the language of Carthage itself supplies a simple and natural explanation; the word Afrygah, signifying a separate establishment, or in other words a colony, as Carthage was of Tyre. So that the Phœnicians of old, at home, may have spoken of their Afrygah, just as we speak of our colonies. Be that as it may, the Arabs of the present day still give the name of Afrygah or Afrikiyah to the territory of the Tunis. It may also be remarked, that the name seems not to have been used by the Romans till after the time of the first Punic war, when they became first acquainted with what they afterwards called Africa Propria.

Africa lies between the latitudes of 38° N. and 35° S., and is of all the continents the most truly tropical. It is, strictly speaking, an enormous peninsula attached to Asia by the isthmus of Suez. The most northern point is the cape, situated a little to the west of Cabo Blanco, and opposite Sicily, which lies in lat. 37° 20' 40" N., long. 9° 41' E. Its southernmost point is Cabo d'Agulhas, in 34° 49' 15" S.; the distance between these two point being 4330 geographical, or about 5000 English miles. The westernmost point is Cabo Verde, in long. 17° 33' W., its easternmost Cape Jerdaffun, in long. 51° 21' E., lat. 10° 25' N., the distance between the two points being about the same as its length. The western coasts are washed by the Atlantic, the northern by the Mediterranean, and the eastern by the Indian Ocean.

The form has been likened to a triangle, or to an oval, but such a comparison is scarcely warranted, it being of an irregular shape, the northern half rounding off, the southern one contracting and terminating in a point.

The superficial extent of Africa has never been accurately determined, but may be taken at 9,858,000 geographical square miles, exclusive of the islands. It is larger than either Europe or Australia, but smaller than Asia and the New World.

The coast line of Africa is very regular and unbrokwn, presenting few bays and peninsulas. The chief indentation is formed by the Gulf of Guinea, with its two secondary divisions, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra. On the northern coast, the Gulf of Sidra and the Gulf of Kabes must be mentioned, and on the eastern coast the Gulf of Arabia.

The physical configuration may be considered under two heads, the great lower-lands and plains of Northern Africa, and the great table-lands, with their mountain ranges and groups, of Central and Southern Africa. The great northern lower-land comprises the Sahara, the Lake Chad region, and the valley of the Lower Nile. The Sahara is by no means a plain throughout, but for the greater part it rises into table-lands, interspersed with mountain groups of 6000 feet elevation, and probably more, and the term lower-lands can only be applied to it in a general way, to distinguish it from the more elevated region to the south.

The Sahara has often been pictured as a monotonous and immense expanse of sand; but nothing could be more erroneous, as the greatest variety exists in the physical configuration of its surface, as well as in its geological features. Our knowledge is as yet too scanty to enable us to trace its features in every part. On the north, this great desert is fringed with extensive table-lands, which in some places rise abruptly from the Mediterranea, as the great plateau of Barbary, extending through Marocco, Algeria, and Tunis, and the table-land of Barca, elevated 1500 feet, and gradually descending towards the Delta of the Nile. This elevated ground is succeeded to the south by a depressed region, which extends from the Great Syrtis or Gulf of Sidra, in a general direction as far as Middle Egypt, and comprises the oases of Augila and Siwah. So greatly depressed is this region, that the level of the oasis of Siwah is 100 feet, and in one place (Bahrein) even 167 feet below the level of the sea. The western portions of this country, between the oases of Augila and Siwah, explored in by the traveller Rohlfs, were found to be everywhere from 100 to 150 feet beneath the level of the Mediterranean; and M. de Lesseps, in conducting a survey from the Egyptian side, found the eastern part to be much beneath the level of the Nile. Here then must be one of the greatest areas of depression in the land of the globe, comparable with that which surrounds the Caspian Sea. This depressed region is again followed by a table-land of considerable extent and width, extending from the Gulf of Kabes in a southerly direction, along the Tripoline shores, and probably traversing, in the same direction, the Libyan Desert, and reaching as far as the Nile, near the first cataract. Its north-western part, as far as Sokna, consists of the Hamadah, a stony, dreary, and extensive table-land, of from 1500 to 2000 feet high, "which seems to be like a broad belt intercepting the progress of commerce, civilisation, and conquest, from the shores of the Mediterranean to Central Africa." Near Sokna this plateau breaks up and forms what are called the Jebel-es-Soda, or Black Mountains, a most picturesque group of cliffs; and again, on the route from Murzuk to Egypt, it also breaks into huge cliffs, and bears the name of El-Harouj. The whole of the central portion of the Northern Sahara, as far south as the plateau of Air or Asben, is occupied by similar bare table-lands, with lower areas of sand dunes between. Numerous wadys, the only inhabited parts of the country, intersect the slopes of these plateaux. The country of Ahaggar, between 23° and 29° N. lat., and 5° E. long., appears to form the central elevation from which the greater of these dry water-courses radiate; from it a series of long wadys—one of them, the wady Rharis or Igharghar, being about 600 miles in length—run northward towards a depressed country which lies inland from the Gulf of Cabes, and contains several salt lagoons, covered with a few feet of water in winter, but dried up in summer, and lying considerably below the Mediterranean level. Other wadys radiate west and south-west from Ahaggar to the unknown region of the Sahara, which lies between this and the northern bend of the Niger. The most truly desert region of the Sahara is an irregular belt of shifting sand dunes, the "Erg" or "Areg," which stretches from the lagoons above referred to near the Mediterranean coast south-westward to near the river Senegal and the Atlantic, in an unbroken chain for upwards of 2000 miles, and having an average width of perhaps 200 miles. In this sand belt the wadys of the inward slope of the plateau of Barbary terminate, excepting the Wady Saura, which crosses the Erg to the important oasis of Tuat, near the centre of its southern border, and the Wady Draa, which turns to the Atlantic coast. From Wady Draa a great plain extends along the western shore as far as the river Senegal, and probably continues as such to the east towards Timbuktu, and thence to Lake Chad. Thus it appears that the western half of the Sahara is surrounded by a broad belt of plains and depressions, the central parts being formed by extensive table-lands, with occasional mountain knots, such as that which forms the fertile kingdom of Air and Asben, the culminating points of which are from 4000 to 5000 feet high.

The eastern portion of the Sahara appears to have nearly the same general elevation as the western half, and near its centre several fertile mountain regions, comparable with that of Asben, are known. Such is the mountainous country of Borgu, north-east of the kingdoms which surround Lake Chad, and Tibesti, north of it, in the centre of the Tibbu district, recently explored by Dr Nachtigal, who found rich vegetation and abundant animal life in the valleys of this mountain group.

To the south and east of the region just described Africa may be considered as one connected mass of elevated land, comprising the most extensive table-lands, as well as high mountain groups and chains.

The great mass of the African plateau land is to south ward of the 10th parallel of N. latitude, but it is pro longed on the eastern side almost to the north coast of the continent by the wedge-shaped table-land of Abyssinia, the highest surface in Africa, and by the mountains which extend from it between the lower course of the Nile and the Red Sea. The terminal point of the high land in this direction may be said to be Jebel Attaka, which rises immediately west of Suez to a height of 2640 feet. From this point to the southern extremity of the Eastern continent the eastern, and generally higher edge, of the great plateau runs in an almost unbroken line. Passing southwards along its margin, the most prominent heights before the table-laud of Abyssinia is reached are Mounts Elba, 6900, and Soturba, 6000 feet in elevation, near the middle of the African coast of the Red Sea. There may, however, be greater heights in the little known region of Nubia, which lies between these mountains and the Nile.

The eastern slope of the Abyssinian plateau begins immediately south of the port of Massowah, and is a uniform line of steep descent, unbroken by any river, falling abruptly from an average height of 7000 feet to the depressed plain winch here skirts the coast of the Red Sea. This edge, which extends southward for at least 800 miles, forms the water-parting of the rivers which have furrowed deeply into the opposite slopes of the plateau, and appears to be higher than the general surface of the country; yet several lofty groups of mountains rising from the level of the high land attain a much greater elevation, and Mount Abba Jared, the highest known point, is estimated at 15,000 feet above the sea. Between the most southern part of Abyssinia which is known and the equator, where the edge of the plateau has again been partly explored, a long space of unknown country intervenes; but there is every reason to believe that the slope is continuous. Mount Kenia, 18,000 feet, and Kilima-njaro, 18,715 feet, the highest points in all Africa, mark the eastern edge under the equator; further south on the inland route from Zanzibar to the Tanganyika, the edge is known as the Rubeho Mountains, with a height of 5700 feet at the pass by which they are crossed on the caravan route. Still further, the edge is again known where it forms a rampart, called the Njesa, walling in the Nyassa Lake. From this point Mount Zomba, 7000 feet high, near Lake Shirwa, Mount Milanje, 8000 feet, and Mount Clarendon, 6000 feet, carry it south to where the Zambeze river makes the first break in its uniform line. The narrows and rapids of Lupata, below the town of Tete, mark the point at which the river breaks through the plateau land to the coast slope beneath it. Passing the river, the eastern edge is again followed in the Mashona and Matoppo Mountains (7200 feet) of Mosilikatse's kingdom, from which heights the chief tributaries of the Limpopo river flow. At the head waters of that river the plateau edge forms the Hooge Veldt of the Transvaal Republic which joins with the Kathlamba or Drakenberg. The portion of the edge which bears this name is specially prominent: it runs southward in a huge wall of rocky crags which support the table-land behind for 500 miles, almost parallel with the coast, and at a distance of 150 miles from it, having Zulu Land, Natal, and Caffraria on the slopes of the spurs which it throws down to the coast. In the Transvaal Republic, where the Drakenberg joins the Hooge Veldt, the edge attains a height of 8725 feet in the summit named after the explorer Mauch, but it is highest where it forms the interior limit of Natal, and where Cathkin Peak rises to 10,357 feet above the sea.

As in Abyssinia, so here, this part of the eastern plateau edge is the great water-parting of the continent, and the streams which form the Orange river flow down its inward slope. There is no break in the continuance of the edge where it passes round from the Drakenberg to form the inmost and highest of the alternate ridges and terraces of the Cape Colony. It is now named in successive parts from east to west the Storm Berge, the Zuur Berg, Schnee Berge, Nieuwe-veld, and Rogge-veld, the last-named portion of the edge turning northward with the bend of the western coast. Its greatest height within the Cape Colony is in Compass Berg, the summit of the Schnee Berge, 8500 feet above the sea.

The outer terraces of the Cape Colony, in which two chief ridges may be traced, lie closer together, and much nearer the coast; between these and the inmost or chief edge is the dry elevated region known as the Great Karroo. Their elevation is also very considerable, though they are broken through by lines of drainage sloping from the chief edge; the part of the middle ridge, which is named the Little Zwarte Berge, attains 7628 feet, and several points in both are upwards of 6000 feet above the sea. Table Mountain, a well-known and flat-topped mass of granite overhanging Cape Town, 3550 feet high, is the nucleus of the peninsula which extends south to form the Cape of Good Hope, but is altogether separated from the mountain ridges of the colony.

The western edge of the great African plateau is generally lower than the eastern, since the whole slope of the continent is more or less from the great heights on its eastern side, towards the west, but it is also clearly traceable, and of great height throughout. Rounding the western side of the Cape Colony, the three ridges above noticed run together, and decrease somewhat in elevation as the mouth of the Orange river is approached. Their elevation at the point of union in Little Namaqua Land is still very considerable; and here Mount Welcome attains 5130 feet, and Vogelklip, to north of it, 4343 feet above the sea. Beyond the Orange river in Namaqua and Damara Lands, the western edge continues in one or more terraces parallel to the coast. Mount Omatako, in the latter country, rises to 8800 feet. Northward, through Benguela and Angola, a more broken series of ridges and terraces mark the descent from the interior plateau, and the great Congo river breaks through to the coast-land at the place where it forms the cataracts of the narrow gorge of Yellala. Sierra Complida is the name given by the Portuguese to that part of the western edge which runs between the Congo and the rapids of the lower Ogowai river on the equator. On the plateau edge at the southern side of this river, Du Chaillu has made known a mountain of 12,000 feet in elevation; and the furthest point which has been reached on the Ogowai was in the vicinity of high mountains. Passing the Ogowai, and following the coast of the Bight of Biafra, the edge is now known as the Sierra do Crystal. The Camaroon mountains, at the head of the gulf, form a high peninsula of volcanic mountains, rising to 13,700 feet; but are isolated from the plateau lands, and belong rather to the remarkable line of volcanic heights which shows itself in the islands of Fernando Po, Prince's Island, St Thomas, and Annobon, stretching away into the ocean in the direction of St Helena. From the Sierra do Crystal the plateau edge inclines towards the lower course of the river Niger to a point above its delta, and below the confluence of the Benue, and then turns abruptly to the east.

The heights which skirt the northern coast-land of the Gulf of Guinea, and which stretch as far as the head-waters of the Senegal and Gambia, and in the inner slope of which the Niger also has its sources, may be considered as an extension from the great plateau. But they are of smaller general elevation; and that best known part of the ridge, which has the name of the Kong Mountains, is apparently not higher than from 2000 to 3000 feet.

The northern edge of the great African plateau is almost unknown; but there are evidences that it runs eastward between the 4th and 8th parallels of N. latitude, to a point at which it is well known, and where the Nile falls over its slope, forming the succession of rapids above Gondokoro. The character of the upper Benue river is that of a mountain-born river; and Mounts Alantika, 10,000 feet high, and Mindif, 6000 feet, which rise to southward of Lake Chad, seem to be the outliers of the plateau edge in which the Benue has its sources. Beyond the Nile the margin of the plateau curves northward, to form the inner slope of the Abyssinian table-land.

The general elevation of the surface of the great African plateau, the limits of which have now been traced, may be taken at from 3000 to 4000 feet above the sea; but its surface presents very great undulations, from the depressions which are occupied by some of the great lakes, to the high mountains which rise above its average level. The most prominent of these interior masses yet known are the Blue Mountains, discovered by Baker, rising from the western shore of the Albert Lake to a height of perhaps 10,000 feet, and which are believed to extend southward to unite with the Balegga Mountains, made known by Livingstone in his journey of 1871, north-west of Lake Tanganyika; these again are believed to join with the mountains which rise midway between the Victoria, the Albert Nyanza, and the Tanganyika, dividing the drainage to these vast lakes, and rising here in Mount M'fumbiro to upwards of 10,000 feet. Another great central line of heights which also had an important part in directing the water-shed of the interior of South Africa, runs from the north of the Nyassa Lake, where it is named the Lobisa plateau, through the Muchinga Mountains, which separate the drainage of the Lualaba and its lakes from that of the Zambeze basin, westward to the heights in the far interior of Angola, known as the Mossamba Mountains, and from which rivers flow in all directions.

The plateau of Barbary, in the north of the continent, beyond the lower land of the Sahara, is a distinct and separate high land, stretching from Cape Bon, on the Mediterranean coast opposite Sicily, in a south-westerly direction to the Atlantic coast, through Tunis, Algeria, and Marocco. The eastern portion of it in Algeria and Tunis rises in a broad plateau from 2000 to 3000 feet in general height, with outer heights, enclosing an elevated steppe, at a distance of about 100 miles apart. On the west, where it enters Marocco, these outer ridges draw together and form the high ranges of the Atlas Mountains, rising to a much greater elevation, and attaining 11,400 feet in the summit named Mount Miltsin.

The African continent, as far as it has yet been explored, seems to be the portion of the globe least disturbed by volcanic action. The known active volcanoes in the continent are those of the Camaroon Mountains, on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea in the west, and the Artali volcano in the depressed region of the salt desert which lies be tween the Abyssinian plateau and the Red Sea. This latter volcano is probably a part of the system with which the volcanic island of Jebel Tur, in the Red Sea, near the same latitude, is connected. One other active volcano only Greater is known by report,—the Njemsi volcano, in the country between Mount Kenia and the Victoria Lake. Shocks of earthquake appear to be almost unknown in any part of the continent. It has been pointed out by the late Sir Roderick Murchison that the older rocks which are known to circle round the continent, unquestionably included an interior marshy or lacustrine country, and that the present centre zone of waters, whether lakes, rivers, or marshes, extending from Lake Chad to Lake Ngami, are but the great modern residual phenomena of those of a mesozoic age. The surface of the South African continent has not been diversified in recent times by the outpouring of lava streams, or broken up by the efforts of subterranean heat to escape. Nor has it been subjected to those great oscillations by which the surfaces of many other countries have been so placed under the waters of the ocean as to have been strewed over with erratic blocks and marine exuviæ. The interior of South Africa may therefore be viewed as a country of very ancient conservative terrestrial character. Knowledge of the special geology of Africa is yet confined to the few parts of the continent in which Europeans have permanently settled. In this respect the southern region of the Cape Colony and Natal have advanced furthest, and their geological features have been mapped out with some accuracy. Elsewhere in the continent, excepting in Algeria and Angola, light has only been thrown along the line followed by the few explorers who have given attention to this subject.

Among the minerals of Africa, salt is widely distributed, though in some districts wholly wanting. Thus in the Abyssinian high laud the salt, which is brought up in small blocks from the depressed salt plain on the Red Sea coast beneath, is so valued as to be used as a money currency; and in the native kingdoms of South Central Africa, the salt districts are royal possessions strictly guarded. Metals seem nowhere very abundant. Gold is perhaps the most generally distributed. The gold-fields of the Transvaal Republic and of the country which extends thence to the Zambeze, are numerous; but no yield has as yet been discovered of sufficient quantity to overcome the difficulties of working, and of transport to the distant sea-ports, to which no navigable rivers lead from this region. Copper is known to exist in large quantities in the mountains of native kingdoms of the centre of South Africa; and one of the objects of Dr Livingstone's present journey is to visit the famed copper country of Katanga south-west of the Tanganyika Lake. The diamond-fields in the districts of the Vaal and Orange rivers north of the Cape Colony are now steadily worked, and give good returns.

Africa is the only one of the continents of the globe which lies equally to north and south of the equator, and the portions of it which extend beyond the tropics do not advance far into the temperate zones. From this it results that Africa, besides being the warmest of all the continents, has also the most equal distribution of the sun's heat during the seasons over the parts which lie north and south of the central line. Winds and rain, depending on the distribution of heat, are also correspondingly developed in these two great divisions of the continent, and the broad landscape zones, passing from humid forest to arid sandy desert, also agree exactly with one another north and south of Equatorial Africa.

Between 10° N. and 10° S. of the equator, but especially in that portion of it the outskirts of which have only as yet been reached by travellers, Africa appears to be a land of dense tropical forest. Wherever it has been penetrated, travellers speak of an excessively rank vegetation; passage has to be forced through thick underwood and creeping plants, between giant trees, whose foliage shuts out the sun's rays; and the land teems with animal and insect life of every form and colour. Describing the forests of Manyuema country, west of the Tanganyika Lake, Livingstone says—"Into these [primæval forests] the sun, though vertical, cannot penetrate, excepting by sending down at midday thin pencils of rays into the gloom. The rain water stands for months in stagnant pools made by the feet of elephants. The climbing plants, from the size of a whipcord to that of a man-of-war's hawser, are so numerous, that the ancient path is the only passage. When one of the giant trees falls across the road, it forms a wall breast high to be climbed over, and the mass of tangled ropes brought down makes cutting a path round it a work of time which travellers never undertake." Here there is a double rainy season, and the rainfall is excessive. To north and south of this central belt, where the rainfall diminishes, and a dry and wet season divides the year, the forests gradually open into a park-like country, and then merge into pastoral grass-lands. In North Africa this pastoral belt is occupied by the native states of the Soudan, from Abyssinia westward, in the parallel of Lake Chad, to the Gambia on the Atlantic coast; and corre sponding to this in the south, are the grass-lands stretching across the continent from the Zambeze to southern Angola and Benguela. The pastoral belts again gradually pass into the dry, almost rainless desert zones of the Sahara in Deserts, the north, and the Kalahari desert in the south, which present many features of similarity.

The extremities of the continent, to which moisture is carried from the neighbouring oceans, again pass into a second belt of pastoral or agricultural land, in the northward slopes of the plateaus of Barbary, Marocco, Algeria, and Tunis, corresponding with the seaward terraces of cultivated land in the Cape Colony in the south.

Taking a broad view of the hydrography of Africa, there are two great areas of continental drainage, one in the north, the other in the south, from which no water escapes directly to the ocean. These correspond almost exactly with the two desert belts of the Sahara and the Kalahari above described. The whole of the remaining portions of the continent, its forests and pastoral districts, in which the greater rainfall gives greater power to the rivers, are drained by streams which find their way to the ocean on one side or other, generally forcing a passage through some, natural or waterworn gorge in the higher circle of mountains which run round the outer edges of the great plateau.

By far the larger portion of the oceanic drainage of the continent is to the Atlantic and its branch the Mediterranean, to which the Nile, Niger, Ogowai, Congo, and Orange rivers flow. The great rivers which drain on the opposite side, to the Indian Ocean, are the Juba, Zambeze, and Limpopo; whilst the northern continental basin, by far more extensive than the southern, has only one great river, the Shari, which supplies Lake Chad.

It must be noticed that the capabilities of the African rivers, as highways of approach to the interior of the continent, are exceedingly small in comparison with those of the other great continents of the globe, most of them being cither barred at their mouths, or by rapids at no great distance from the coast. It is owing to this physical cause mainly that the African continent has remained for so many centuries a sealed book to the civilised world. On the other hand, it must be observed, that when these outer barriers have been passed, the great interior of the land, in its most productive regions, possesses a network of vast rivers and lakes, unsurpassed in extent by those of any country of the world, by means of which the resources of Central Africa may in future be thoroughly developed.

The Nile is the oldest of historical rivers, and afforded the only means of subsistence to the earliest civilised people on earth, and yet the origin of this river remained an enigma almost to the present day. Though it drains a larger area than any other river of Africa, upwards of 1,000,000 square miles, and in this respect is one of the largest rivers of the globe, the Nile, passing for a great portion of its lower course through the desert belt of North Africa, and receiving no tributaries there, loses much of its volume by evaporation, and is far surpassed in the quantity of water conveyed to the ocean by the Congo, in the moist equatorial zone. The great labours of Dr Livingstone, in the lake region of Central Africa, have so narrowed the space within which the sources of the Nile can exist, that, though no traveller has yet reached the ultimate feeders of the great river, their position can now be predicated almost with certainty. The limit of the Nile basin on the south is formed by the high mountains which rise to westward of the Albert Lake, and which divide between this great reservoir and the Tanganyika, extending eastward to the plateau of Unyamuezi, on the northern side of which the Victoria Nyanza lies. The ultimate sources must then be the feeders of these great equatorial lakes, the Victoria and Albert. The river issuing from the former lake, at the Ripon Falls, 3300 feet above the sea, to join the northern end of the Albert Nyanza, may be considered as the first appearance of the Nile as a river. At the Ripon Falls the overflow is from 400 to 500 feet in breadth, and the descent of 12 feet is broken in three places by rocks. Further down, where the river turns westward to join the Albert Lake, it forms the Karurna and Murchison Falls, the latter being 120 feet in height. From the Albert Lake, the Nile, called the Kir in this part, begins its almost due northward course to the Mediterranean, and has no further lake expansion. Be tween the Albert and Gondokoro, in 5° N. lat., which lies at 2000 feet above the sea, the Nile descends at least 500 feet in a series of rapids and cataracts. Beyond Gondokoro, up to which point it is navigable, it enters the northern lower land of Africa, which is here a region of swamps and forests, and several tributaries join it from the west. The largest of these, named the Bahr-el-Ghazal, unites with the main stream below the 10th parallel; and, not much further on, a main tributary, the Sobat river, joins the Nile from the unknown region which lies to the south-east. Hence, onward, the Nile is known as the Bahr-el-Abiad or White River. The two remaining great tributary rivers descend from the high land of Abyssinia on the cast. The first of these, the Bahr-el-Azrek or Blue River, its waters being pure in comparison with those of the Nile, has its source near Lake Dembea or Tzana, through which it flows, in the western side of the Abyssinian plateau, 6000 feet above the sea; forming a semicircular curve in the plateau, the Blue Nile runs north-westward to the confluence at Khartum, 1345 feet above the sea. Between this point and the union of the next tributary, the Nile forms the cataract which is known as the sixth from its mouth. In about 18° N. it is joined by the Atbara or Black River, the head stream of which is the Takkazze, flowing in a deep cut valley of the high land. This tributary is named from the dark mud which it carries from the high land, brought down to it by streams which swell into rushing torrents in the rainy season. It is to these rivers that the fertility of Lower Egypt is mainly due, for each year a vast quantity of Abyssinian mud is borne down to be spread over the delta. Hence the Nile pursues its way in a single line through the dry belt of desert to the Mediterranean without a single tributary, descending by five cataracts, at considerable distances apart. The delta of the Nile, in which the river divides into two main branches, from which a multitude of canals are drawn off, is a wide low plain, occupying an area of about 9000 square miles. The most remarkable circumstance connected with the delta is the annual rise and overflow of the river, which takes place with the greatest regularity in time and equality in amount, beginning at the end of June, and subsiding completely before the end of November, leaving over the whole delta a layer of rich fertilising slime.

The Sheliff in Algeria, and the Muluya in Eastern Marocco, are the chief streams flowing to the Mediterranean from the high land of Barbary.

Passing round to the Atlantic system, the Sebu, the Ummer Rebia, and the Tensift, from the Atlas range, are permanent rivers flowing across the fertile plain of Western Marocco, which they serve to irrigate. Next is the Wady Draa, a water-course which has its rise on the inner slope of the high land in Marocco, and which bends round through the Maroccan Sahara to the Atlantic, near the 28th parallel. Its channel, of not less than 500 miles in length, forms a long oasis in the partly desert country through which it flows, and water remains in its bed nearly throughout the year.

A stretch of 1100 miles of waterless coast, where the desert belt touches on the Atlantic, intervenes between the Draa and the Senegal river, at the beginning of the pastoral belt in lat. 15° N.

The Senegal rises in the northern portion of the belt of mountains which skirt the Guinea coast, and has a north-westerly course to the sea. During the rainy season it is navigable for 500 miles, from its mouth to the cataract of Feloo, for vessels drawing 12 feet of water, but at other times it is not passable for more than a third part of this distance. The Gambia has its sources near those of the Gamb Senegal, and flows westward in a tortuous bed over the plain country, giving a navigable channel of 400 miles, up to the Falls of Barra Ivunda. The Rio Grande, from the same heights, is also a considerable river.

The Niger is the third African river in point of area Niger, of drainage and volume; it is formed by the union of two great tributaries, the Quorra and Benue,—the former from the west, the latter from the country in the east of the river basin. The Quorra, called the Joliba in its upper course, has its springs in the inner slope of the mountains which give rise to the Senegal and Gambia, not far from the Atlantic coast. At first its course is north-eastward to as far as the city of Timbuctu, on the border of the desert zone; then it turns due east, and afterwards south-east to its confluence with the Benue, at a point 200 miles north from the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. The chief tributary of the Quorra is the Sokoto river, coming from the elevated country which forms the water-parting between the Niger basin and that of Lake Chad on the east, and its confluence is near the middle of the portion of the channel of the Quorra which bends to south-east.

At a distance of about 100 miles from its sources, the traveller Park, the first European who reached the Joliba, found it flowing in a wide fertile valley, and navigated by canoes which kept up a constant traffic. Above Timbuctu the commerce of the river is busily carried on in barges of 60 to 80 tons burden; further on, where the river touches upon the desert belt in the most northerly portion of its course, its fertile banks form the most marked contrast to the arid desert lands beyond. From the confluence of the Sokoto to the union with the Benue, the river course is only navigable after the rainy season, since at other times rocks and shoals interrupt the passage. The sources of the Benue are unknown as yet, but it is believed to have its rise in the northern edge of the great plateau of Southern Africa, almost due south of Lake Chad; its known course is westward, and at the furthest point to which it was easily navigated by the traveller Baikie, nearly 400 miles from its confluence with the Kawara or Quorra, it was still half a mile in width and about 10 feet in average depth, flow ing through rich plains. From the confluence of the Quorra and Benue the Niger has a due south course to its delta, and the united river has an average width of about a mile. At a distance of 100 miles from the sea, minor branches which enclose the delta separate from the main stream on each side. The delta is much more extensive than that of the Nile, and measures about 14,000 square miles of low alluvial plain, covered with forest and jungle, and com pletely intersected by branches from the main river, the outmost of which reach the sea not less than 200 miles apart. Unlike the Nile, the Niger possesses one main channel through the centre of the delta, called at its mouth the Nun river.

Old Calabar river, the Camaroon river, and the Gaboon, are the best known of a number of wide inlets or estuaries of the sea, which occur on the west coast immediately north of the equator; but these are merely the receptacles of a number of minor streams, not the mouths of great rivers, as at one time supposed.

The Ogowai (pron. Ogowee) river, the delta of which forms Cape Lopez, immediately S. of the equator, is a great stream which is believed to drain a large area of the forest zone between the Niger and the Congo; as yet, its lower coast in only known to a distance of 200 miles from the sea. Above the delta the main stream of the river, named the Okanda, breaks through the edge of the plateau, and is joined by the Onango, a tributary from the coast range of the Sierra Complida. Below this confluence the river is a mile and a half in average width, its depth varying from 15 to 50 feet. The delta is formed by the two main branches into which the Ogowai divides at about 30 miles from the coast, and is a swampy flat, covered with mangroves.

The Congo or Zaire must be considered the second river of Africa in point of area of drainage, and it is the first in respect of the volume of water which it discharges to the ocean. There remains but little doubt that the head streams of this vast river are those which supply the great lacustrine system discovered by Dr Livingstone in his recent journeys south and west of Lake Tanganyika. Through these lakes the river, which rises in the upland north of Lake Nyassa, named in different parts of its course the Chambeze, Luapula, or Lualaba, flows in great bends to west and northward, to where it passes into the unknown country still to be explored in the heart of the continent. The Lualaba has a great tributary named the Lufira, from the south; and it is almost certain that the Kassabi river, which springs in the Mossamba Mountains, in the interior borders of Angola, is also one of the feeders of this great river. The Guango river, rising in the same mountains, nearer Angola, must also join the Congo lower down in its valley. At the furthest point on the Lualaba reached by Livingstone, in about lat. 6° S. and long. 25° E., the great river had a breadth of from 2000 to 6000 yards, and could not be forded at any season of the year. Every circumstance connected with this river—its direction, the time of its annual rising, and the volume of its water which could be discharged by the Congo mouth alone—point to its identity with this river. The explorer Tuckey, who, in 1816, followed up the Congo from its mouth on the west coast further than any one, found it, above the cataracts which it forms in breaking through the coast range, to have a width of from 2 to 4 English miles, and with a current of from 2 to 3 miles an hour; and his statement that at the lowest stage of its waters it discharges 2,000,000 of cubic feet of water per second, has been confirmed by more recent surveys. Forty miles out from its mouth its waters are only partially mingled with that of the sea, and some nine miles from the coast they are still perfectly fresh. The Congo is the only one of the large African rivers which has any approach to an estuary, contrasting in this respect with those which have delta mouths.

The Coanza, the most important river of Angola, in respect of its affording a navigable channel for 140 miles from its mouth, rises in a broad valley formed by the Mossamba Mountains in the interior of Benguela, and curves north-westward to the ocean. Its upper course is rapid, and its navigation only begins after the last of its cataracts has been passed; the mouth is closed by a bar. The Cunene river has its rise in the opposite watershed of the mountains, its springs being close to those of the Coanza, and its course is south-westward, forming the southern limit of the territory of Mossamedes. It is the most southerly river of the central fertile zones of Africa on this side of the continent, and appears to be suitable for navigation throughout the greater part of its length—rising from 15 to 20 feet at times of flood, but having such a depth, at its lowest stage, as to be only passable by canoes.

From the Cunene, in lat. 17° S., to the Orange river in 29° S., the dry belt of the South African desert zone intervenes, and there are no permanent rivers on the land sloping to the sea. The coast lands from the edge of the plateau are, however, furrowed by numerous water-courses, which are filled only after the occaisional rainfalls.

The Orange river also belongs for the greater part of its lower course to the water-courses of the arid belt, but it receives such a constant supply from its head streams, which descend from the high lands near the east coast of the continent, as to be able to maintain a perennial flow in its channel, which, however, is so shallow as to be of no value for navigation. Its main head streams are the Vaal and Nu Gariep or Orange, which rise on the opposite slopes of one of the summits of the Drakenberg range, called the Mont aux Sources. After encircling the Orange River Free State, these rivers unite near the centre of this part of the continent to form the Orange, which continues westward to the Atlantic, but without receiving any permanent tributary. The chief water channels which periodically carry supplies to it from the south are Brak and the Great Hartebeeste; from the Kalahari region in the north come the Molopo and Nosob channels. Midway between the union of the head streams and the ocean the river forms a great fall of 150 feet in height.

The rivers which flow down from the terraces of the Cape Colony are numerous, but have little permanent depth of water, shrinking almost to dryness excepting after rains, when they become impetuous torrents; some have cut deep channels, much beneath the level of the country, and the banks of these cañons are choked with dense vegetation. Passing round to Natal and Zulu Land, the coast country is well watered by frequent streams which descend from the base of the cliff-wall of the Drakenberg; these have generally the character of mountain torrents, with rapid flow between high banks and changing volume, and are almost without exception closed at their mouths by sand bars, which in most instances shut in considerable lagoons. One of these, the lake of Santa Lucia, is more than 40 miles in length.

The first large river of the Indian Ocean system is the Limpopo or Crocodile river, so named from the great numer of these animals found in its bed. Its basin lies centrally in the southern tropic, also in the desert belt, and on this account it barely maintains a shallow flow of water throughout the year. Its sources are in that part of the plateau edge in the Transvaal Republic which is known as the Hooge Veldt and Magalies Berg; from this it forms a wide semicircular sweep to north-east and south, reaching the ocean not far north of Delagoa Bay, in 25° S. Its chief tributary, the Olifant or Lepalule, has its rise in a part of the Hooge Veldt which is nearer the coast. Many of its minor tributaries in its lower course are periodical streams known as sand rivers, only filled after heavy rains.

The Zambeze is the great river of the pastoral belt of South Africa, and the fourth in point of size in the continent, draining nearly 600,000 square miles. As far as its basin has yet been explored, the Zambeze has three head streams from the great water-parting ridge which extends from the Mossamba Mountains of inner Angola to the high lands north of Nyassa Lake, about the 12th parallel of S. latitude. There are the Lungebungo river from the Mossamba Mountains, the Leeba river from Lake Dilolo, on the water-parting which separates between the Zambeze and the Kassabi river, and the Leeambye or Jambaji, probably the main-source stream, coming from the unknown lands south-west of the Cazembe's territory. From the union of these streams the general course of the Zambeze is in two wide curves eastward, through the plateau and over its edge to the Indian Ocean, in about 19° S. lat. From the north its main tributaries are the Kafue and Loangwa or Aruangoa rivers, and the Shire river, flowing out of Lake Nyassa. Above this point, on its middle course, where it forms the great Victoria Falls, the Zambeze receives the Chobe from the north-west; and from southward numerous minor tributaries join its lower channel. The Zambeze forms a delta with many mouths, the outmost of which are nearly 100 miles apart, and their entrances are generally barred by sand banks; but if these be passed, the main river is continuously navigable for 320 miles to the town of Teté, and its tributary the Shire may also be followed up for nearly 150 miles, to where its cataracts stop navigation. At the Victoria Falls the great river contracts stop navigation. At the Victoria Falls the great river contracts from its general width of nearly a mile, to 60 or 80 feet, and plunges over a height of 100 feet, into a remarkable zig-zag gorge rent in the hard basalt rocks.

The Rovuma, which has its chief tributaries from the plateau edge of the eastern side of Lake Nyassa, is the next great river of the drainage to the Indian Ocean. It has been navigated by Livingstone for 150 miles from the coast, and formed part of his route in entering the continent on the journey from which he has not yet returned, but its basin has not yet been explored.

Still farther north the mouths of a great river named the Rufiji are known, on the coast opposite the island of Monfia, south of Zanzibar; but no part of its course has yet been traced by any European.

The Kingani and the Wami are two streams from the plateau edge, in the country of Usagara, and reach the sea in the channel formed by Zanzibar island. The Pangani river, further north, rises in the snowy mountain Kilimanjaro. The Sabaki and Dana, which embouch on the opposite side of Formosa Bay, in 3° S., flow over the same coast plains, having their head springs in the spurs of Mount Kenia. The latter river might be navigated during the rainy season for 100 miles from the coast.

The Juba river is the most considerable on the eastern side north of the equator. It is believed to have its rise in the high lands immediately south of Abyssinia, and its general direction is south-eastward to the Indian Ocean; but nothing is known on its higher course except by report. The ill-fated expedition under Baron von der Decken explored this river for about 180 miles upwards from its mouth, but as yet no traffic is carried on by its means. The Webbe or Haines river flows down from the high lands in a direction nearly parallel to the Juba, a little farther north, but its outlet on the coast is completely barred by sand dunes of from 400 to 500 feet in height, behind which it forms a lagoon of varying extent. The desert zone is now again reached, and the water supply fails. No permanent rivers reach the Red Sea from the Abyssinian highlands or from the heights of Nubia which continue these northward; the largest water-course is that of the Barca, which is periodically filled by its tributaries in the northern part of the Abyssinian plateau.

Turning now to the great areas of continental drainage, it is observed that in North Africa there is a vast space of upwards of four millions of square miles, extending from the Nile valley westward to the Atlantic coast, and from the plateau of Barbary in the north to the extremities of the basin of Lake Chad in the south, from which no single river finds its way to the sea. The whole of this space, however, appears to be furrowed by water channels in the most varied directions. From the inner slopes of the plateau of Barbary numerous wadys take a direction towards the great sand-belt of the Erg, in which they terminate; a great series of channels appears to radiate from the higher portion of the Sahara, which lies immediately north of the tropic of Cancer and in about 5° E. of Greenwich; another cluster radiates from the Mountains of Tibesti, in the eastern Sahara.

Lake Chad, on the margin of the pastoral belt, is supplied by a large river named the Shari, coming from the moist forest country which lies nearer the equator; and the lake, which till recently was believed to have no outlet, overflows to north-eastward, fertilising a great wady, in which the waters become lost by evaporation as they are led towards the more arid country of the Sahara.

The southern area of continental drainage is of much smaller extent, and occupies the space of the desert zone which lies between the middle of the Zambeze basin and Damara Land. It centres in Lake Ngami, to which the Tioge river flows from the pastoral belt on the north-west. Several water-courses from the high Damara Land also take a direction toward this lake. The river Zuga carries off the overflow of Lake Ngami towards a series of salt lagoons which lie eastward near the edge of the plateau; but it becomes narrower and less in volume as it approaches these, and in some seasons scarcely reaches their bed.

Smaller spaces of continental drainage exist at various points near the eastern side of the continent. One of these occupies the depressed area between the base of the Abyssinian highland and the Red Sea, and is properly a continuation of the Sahara desert belt beyond the intervening plateau. In this space the Hawash river, descending from the plateau, terminates before reaching the sea. Another interior basin lies in the plateau between the edge on which mountains Kenia and Kilima-njaro rise and the country east of the Victoria Lake, and includes several salt lakes. It is probable that the great Tanganyika Lake is the centre of a third basin of no outflow on this side of the great plateau; and Lake Shirwa, south-east of the Nyassa, constitutes a fourth.

The great lakes, which form such a prominent feature in African hydrography, are found chiefly in the southern and eastern regions of the continent, but they are distributed over all the systems of drainage. The Victoria and Albert Lakes of the Nile basin are great seas of fresh water; and if their extent should ultimately prove to be nearly that which is at present believed, they rival the great American lakes for the place of the greatest expanse of fresh water on the globe. The former, the Victoria Lake, is at an elevation of about 3300 feet above the sea; and its outline, as at present sketched on our maps, occupies an area of not less than 30,000 square miles. The Albert Lake, 2500 feet above the sea, is believed to have an extent nor far short of this. Lake Baringo, north-east of the Victoria, is reported to be a great fresh lake, discharging towards the Nile by a river which is possibly the Sobat tributary. Lake Tzana or Dembea, 60 miles in length, at a level of 6000 feet above the sea, on the Abyssinian plateau, is the only remaining great lake of the Nile basin.

The great expansions of the Chambeze-Lualaba river, presumably belonging to the river Congo, are the only considerable lakes of the Atlantic drainage. The highest of them, Lake Bangweolo or Bemba, is described as being 150 miles in length from east to west, and at an elevation of 4000 feet; Lake Moero, the next, extends through 60 miles; Lakes Kamalondo or Ulenge, and the yet unvisited lakes of the same drainage, are described as of vast extent, and lie at an elevation of about 2000 feet above the sea.

Belonging to the drainage system of the Indian Ocean are, Lake Nyassa, 1500 feet above the sea, and stretching meridionally over an area of nearly 9000 square miles in the basin of the Zambeze; and Lake Samburu, a reported lake of great extent, lying in the plateau edge north of Mount Kenia, and probably belonging to the basin of the Juba river. The great Lake Tanganyika, upwards of 10,000 square miles in area, and united by a broad channel with Lake Liemba in the south, occupies a deep longitudinal basin, girt with mountain; it is 2800 feet above the sea level. As yet no outlet has been discovered for this vast lake, and the question whether it has or has not an overflowering river, is still undecided; but its waters are not perfectly fresh, the drainage to it is small, and the probability is that the Tanganyika is a continental lake. Lake Shirwa, enclosed by mountains on the plateau edge south-east of Lake Nyassa, and 2000 feet above the sea, has brackish water, and no outlet.

Lake Chad, the greatest lake of the continental system of North Africa, is a shallow lagoon of very variable extent, with numerous islands: it lies at about 1100 feet above the sea; its waters are fresh and clear, and its overflow is carried off to north-eastward by the wady named Bahr-el-Ghazal.

Lake Ngami, the corresponding lake in the southern continental system, at an elevation of about 2900 feet, is also a shallow reedy lagoon, varying in extent according to the season. The Zuga river carries off its surplus water to eastward. Salt lakes are of frequent occurrence in the areas of continental drainage; perhaps the most remarkable of these is the Assal lake, which lies in a depression east of Abyssinia comparable with that of the Dead Sea, 600 feet beneath the level of the Red Sea; the Sebka-el-Faroon or Schott Kebir, south of Tunis, is a great salt lagoon, 100 miles in length, dried up in summer, when its bed is found to be thickly encrusted with salt, and in winter covered with water to a depth of two or three feet. It lies several feet beneath the level of the Mediterranean.

Africa lies almost entirely in the torrid zone, and is the hottest continent of all. The greatest heat, however, is not found under the equator, since the whole of the central belt of the continent is protected by a dense covering of forest vegetation, supported by the heavy rainfall, and has in consequence a more equable climate, but in the dry, bare exposed desert belts, which lie on the margins of the tropics, the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari in the south, where the climate is extreme. The highest temperature is found throughout the Sahara, particularly in its eastern portions towards the Red Sea. In Upper Egypt and Nubia eggs may be baked in the hot sands; and the saying of the Arabs is, "in Nubia the soil is like fire and the wind like a flame." The regions along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts are rendered more temperate by the influence of the sea. To the south of the Great Desert the temperature decreases, chiefly on account of the increasing moisture and protection of the land surface from extreme heating by its tree growth, but also because of the greater elevation of the land as the great southern plateau is approached. Both on account of its elevation and its narrower form, which gives greater access to the equalising influence of the surrounding ocean, the southern half of the African continent has a less high temperature than the northern, though the same gradations of climate outward from the centre belt are clearly marked in each division. Regular snowfalls does not occur even in the most southern or northern regions; and this phenomenon is only known in the most elevated points of the continent, as in the Atlas Mountains in the north, the summits of which retain patches of snow even in summer, in the Abyssinian peaks, in the highest points of the mountains of the Cape Colony, and most remarkably in the lofty summits of Mounts Kenia and Kilima-njaro, which rise on the plateau directly beneath the equator. The intensity of radiation and its influence upon the temperature are very great in Northern Africa; while in the day time the soil of the Sahara rapidly absorbs the solar rays, during the night it cools so rapidly that the formation of ice has often been known to occur.

The observed average temperatures of the extreme months of the year at various points of Africa, from N. to S., are given in the following table:—

Africa is not much under the influence of the regular winds, except the monsoons of the Indian Ocean, the great movement of the atmosphere depending chiefly on the oscillation of the continent beneath the sun during the seasons, as will be afterwards explained. The wind currents over the whole continent have a prevailing direction from the east. There are the trade winds, modified by interruptions of changing heat and elevation of the land surface. In the northern part of the Indian Ocean the year is divided between the south-west monsoon, blowing from March till September, away from Africa, towards the then heated continent of Asia; and the north-east monsoon, or rather the normal trade wind, blowing towards the African coasts, from October till February. It will be seen in the next paragraph, that the monsoons, although they extend only to about a third portion of the East Africa shores, have an extremely important bearing upon the physical economy of the whole African continent. From hurricanes Africa is nearly exempt, except in its south-eastern extremity, to which at times the Mauritius hurricanes extend. At rare intervals these have visited the east coast as far as Zanzibar. Northern Africa is much exposed to the hot winds and storms from the Sahara, which are called in Egypt Khamsin, in the Mediterranean Scirocco, Shume or Asshume in Marocco, and Harmattan on the west coasts of the Sahara and in the countries bordering on the Gulf of Guinea. These always blow directly across the coast from the interior, and seem to move round the compass during the year, beginning in Egypt in April, in Algeria in July, in Marocco in August, in Senegambia in November. Similar dry electrical winds are experienced in the Kalahari desert in the south. Whirlwinds, frequently carrying sand up into the atmosphere, are of frequent occurrence in these deserts, and are also known in the dry region of Unyamuezi, between Zanzibar and the Tanganyika, and in the Limpopo basin farther south. Extreme heat and dryness are the characteristics of these winds, which, raising the sand, filling the air with dust, and prodigiously favouring the powers of evaporation, are often fatal to the vegetable and animal creation in the regions visited by them.

In Africa the dependence of the winds and rains upon the movement of the land beneath the sun is more clearly marked than in any other intertropical region of the globe. The high temperature caused by the vertical heat of the sun over a particular area induces an indraught of air to that place, an ascending current is produced which carries up with it the warm and moist air; condensed in the higher regions of the atmosphere, the moisture falls as rain, and the condensation makes way for a further indraught. It is thus that in Africa the winds and rains follow as a rule the pendulating movement of the continent beneath the sun, and the rainy season of any space begins almost immediately after the sun has reached its zenith. Between the tropics and the equator the sun comes twice to the zenith of each belt during the year, at the tropical lines the sun is only once in the zenith; thus it follows that a double rainy season is observed in all places lying in the central belt of the tropics, and a single rainy season in those which are nearer the skirts of the zone. These wet and dry seasons correspond to the cooler and hotter periods of the year, and take the place of the summer and winter of the temperate regions. Various circumstances tend to interfere with and modify the working of this general rule of the rotation of seasons. In Southern Africa that rainy season which follows the apparent movement of the sun northward, is greater than that which ensues after his passage south, since in the former case the winds are drawn inwards from the ocean and carry greater quantities of moisture, whereas in the latter the winds are drawn from the land north of the equator, and their moisture is already in great part spent. In the northern and eastern regions of Africa the winds and rains are governed as much by heating and cooling of the Asiatic continent as by that of Africa itself, but in the central and western portions of the continent the rule is well exemplified. Thus in Damara Land, bordering on the southern tropic, there is one short rainy season from February till April, beginning only with the northing sun; at Loanda in Angola the greater rains last from February till May, the lesser rainy season, when the sun has passed this place going south, occurs in November only. At Annobon island, surrounded by wide sea, April and May are the rainy months of the northing sun, October and November of the southing. The Guinea coast, facing the sea to southward, has its greater rainy season from March to June, when the northing sun draws the ocean winds on to the coast; and its lesser rains occur in October and November, when the sun has passed southward from the land. Nearing the northern tropical line, the coast-land from Sierra Leone to the Senegal river has a simple wet and dry season during the year.

On the eastern coast-land the rains are more dependant on the direction of the monsoon winds; about the mouths of the Zambeze and on the Mozambique coast the rains begin in November, after the north-east monsoon wind has set in over the northern part of the Indian Ocean, bringing with it the vapours drawn from the sea to condense on the coast slopes. The rains continue here till March, when the south-west monsoon begins to blow away from the land towards the then heated surface of Asia. At Zanzibar there is a double rainy season, a stronger in the months of March, April, and May, with the northing sun, beginning immediately after the south-west monsoon, continuing till June, and during this period the sky is obscured by heavy clouds. The second rainy season here is only marked by a few showers in September and October. Whils the north-east monsoon is blowing the sky remains of a cloudless blue. In the interior of the continent, between these tropical coasts, the rainy seasons appear rather to precede than follow the advancing sun. In the region of the central Zambeze the greater rains last through February, March, and April, the lesser occurring in October and November. The worst droughts are experienced in December and January. Nearer the centre of the continent the two rainy seasons become so lengthened as almost to merge into one period of rains, extending over about eight months of the year. In the newly-explored country south-west of the Tanganyika, Dr Livingstone found that the rains began in October, and that the last showers fell in May; but there is probably a drier period between these limits. At the Tanganyika Lake the rainy season begins in September, lasting till May, and the same rainy reason has been observed in the interior country of the west coast immediately north of the equator. Between these points, in Manuyema country, Dr Livingstone found that the rains continued till July, or almost through the year. Northward in the interior the rainy seasons are again clearly divided into a greater and lesser, and in the regions west of the Upper Nile between 5° and 10° N. lat., the stronger rains occur from August till October, the weaker come with the northing sun in April and May. The plateau of Abyssinia, rising high above the general level of the north of Africa, and intercepting and condensing the moist winds, has also a double rainy season,—a greater from June to September, when the sun is passing southward; a lesser in February and April, with the northing sun. The rainy seasons in Central Africa are ushered in and accompanied by violent thunderstorms and by occasional falls of hail. The quantity of the rainfall, which is excessive in the regions near the equator, diminishes rapidly to north and south of this belt as the dry regions on the borders of the tropics are approached.

The Sahara, and also the Kalahari of Southern Africa, are almost rainless regions, but wherever a sufficient elevation occurs to intercept a cooler stratum of the atmosphere, rain is not wanting, even in the midst of the Great Desert. A striking instance of this is related by Mr Richardson. That traveller relates that when on the borders of the mountain know of "Aïr, in about latitude 19° N., on the 30th Sept. 1850, there was a cry in the encampment, 'The wady is coming.' Going out to look, I saw a broad white sheet of foam advancing from the south between the trees of the valley. In ten minutes after a river of water came pouring along, and spread all around us, converting the place of our encampment into an isle of the valley. The current in its deepest part was very powerful, capable of carrying away sheep and cattle, and of uprooting trees. This is one of the most interesting phenomena I have witnessed during my present tour in Africa. The scene, indeed, was perfectly African. Rain had been observed falling in the south; black clouds and darkness covered that zone of the heavens, and an hour afterwards came pouring down this river of water into the dry parched-up valley."

The causes of want of rainfall in the vast region of the Sahara appear to be mainly these—that the winds advancing towards it come from a cooler and moister to a warmer and drier region, indeed to the hottest and driest of all, and so are constantly losing in moisture and gaining in temperature as they approach; the high plateau of Abyssinia forms an effective screen from the winds of the Indian Ocean, wringing out their moisture before the Sahara is reached, and on the Atlantic side the north-east trade wind constantly blows away from the land; a barrier of mountains also deprives the Sahara of rain from the south-west. Another cause of dryness is the low level of great areas of the Sahara. We have seen that wherever there is a considerable elevation, even in its midst there is a periodical rainfall. The Kalahari region is almost rainless, on account of the great heat to which it is subjected; but specially because the winds coming towards it from the eastward, the prevailing winds, expend their moisture on the high slopes of the plateau which face the Indian Ocean. Heavy dews, consequent on the rapid changes of day and night temperature in these bare regions, partly compensate the deficiency of rain.

The portions of the continent which lie beyond the tropics north and south, the outer slopes of the plateau of Barbary and of the Cape Colony, have no marked rainy season, and the times of the occurrence of rain are altered, the summers of both being drier, the showers more frequent in winter. In Natal, and on the slopes of the plateau in its neighbourhood, rain may be expected in any month; but the greatest falls occur from October to March. The absolute quantity of rain which falls in Africa has as yet been measured at so few points, that no definite conclusions can be arrived at respecting it.

Although Africa belongs almost entirely to the torrid and warm zones, its vegetable productions are essentially groves of oranges and olives, plains covered with wheat and barely, thick woods of evergreen oaks, cork-trees, and sea-pines, intermixed with cypresses, myrtles, arbutus, and fragrant tree-heaths, form the principal features of the landscape. On this northern coast the date-palm is first found; but its fruit does not arrive at perfection, and it is chiefly valued as an ornamental object in gardens. Various kinds of grain are cultivated. Beyond this region of the coast and the Atlas chain, with the borers of the Sahara, commences a new scene. It is in this region, extending to the border of Soudan, that the date-tree forms the characteristic feature. Being peculiarly adapted to excessive dryness and high temperature, it flourishes where few other plants can maintain an existence. Were it not for the fruit of the invaluable date-tree, the inhabitants of the desert would almost entirely depend on the products of other regions for their subsistence. With the southern boundary of the Sahara, the date-tree disappears, the baobab or monkey bread-tree takes its place, and, under the influence of the tropical rains, a new, rich, and highly-developed flora presents itself. These trees, together with huge cotton-trees, oil-palms, sago-palms, and others of the same majestic tribe, determine the aspect of the landscape. The laburnum expands its branches of golden flower, and replaces the senna of the northern regions, and the swamps are often covered with immense quantities of the papyrus plant. Instead of waving fields of corn, the cassava, yam, pigeon-pea, and the ground-nut, form the farinaceous plants. The papaw, the tamarind, the Senegal custard-apple, and others, replace the vine and the fig. In Southern Africa, again, the tropical forms disappear, and in the inland desert-like plains, the fleshy, leafless, contorted, singular tribes of kapsias, of mesembryanthemums, euphorbias, crassulas, aloes, and other succulent plants, make their appearance. Endless species of heaths are there found in great beauty, and the hills and rocks are scattered over with a remarkable tribe of plants called Cycadaceæ. Plants of the protea tribe also add to the extraordinary variety in the vegetable physiognomy of that region.

Of the characteristic African plants, the date-tree is one of the most important, as it is likewise among the nearly one thousand different species of palms. It furnishes, as it were, the bread of the desert, beyond which it occurs only in Western Asia, wherever a similar dry and hot climate prevails. This tree requires a sandy soil, and springs must not be absent. The dates furnish food not only for man, but for the camel and the horse. For the latter purpose the stones are used in many parts, and are said to be more nourishing than the fruit itself. The Arabs make a great variety of dishes of which dates form the chief part. Of the sap of the tree palm-wine is prepared, and the young leaves are eaten like cabbage.

In Southern Africa are the extensive miniature woods of heaths, as characteristic as the groves of date-palms in the north. No less than five hundred species have already been discovered. These plants, of which some reach the height of 12 to 15 feet (Erica urceolaris), are covered throughout the greater part of the year with innumerable flowers of beautiful colours, the red being prevalent.

The papyrus is an aquatic plant, having a stem from 3 to 6 feet high. It inhabits both stagnant waters and running streams, and is common in the countries of the Nile, particularly Egypt and Abyssinia. Its soft, smooth flower-stem afforded the most ancient material form which paper was prepared, and for this reason it is one of the noticeable African plants. It has, however, also been used for other purposes; its flowering stems and leaves are twisted into ropes; and the roots, which are sweet, and used as food.^[1]

The following table, compiled from the "synonymic lists of species of mammals" given by Mr Andrew Murray,^[2] affords a general view of the distribution of terrestrial mammals in the different parts of Africa,—the figures denoting the number of species found in each of the divisions, those in the last column being the number peculiar to Africa:—

The order Quadrumana is well represented, more particularly within the tropics, whence they decrease northwards and southwards. The most important members of this family are the antropoid monkeys, the chimpanzee and gorilla, in Tropical and Western Africa. Baboons and mandrils, with few exceptions, are peculiar to Africa. Only a few species of the genus Macacus, which is East Indian, are found in Africa. The only short-tailed species (Macacus Innuus) is North African, and is also found wild on the opposite coast at the Rock of Gibraltar. In Madagascar the place of the true monkeys is supplied by the peculiar tribe of the true Lemurs or makis. Many species have close affinities with those of Asia; thus the orang-outang of Borneo is represented in Africa by the chimpanzee. The gibbons are entirely wanting.

Of the larger Carnivora the bear is almost entirely wanting, and occurs only sparely in the Atlas Mountains in Barbary. The true martens are unknown, but otters occur. Of the Canis family the jackal is characteristic, and roams over the whole of Africa; it differs from the Asiatic species in its paler skin, which approaches the colour of the prevailing deserts. The wold and fox do not extend beyond the northern margin of Africa. Hyænas are true African tenants; the striped hyæna extending from Asia over North Africa, the spotted hyæna over the remainder of the continent; in the southmost part of the continent the brown hyæna is also found, and with it the aardwolf, or earth wolf of the Cape colonists, allied to this genus. Africa is the chief home of the lion, which there remains undisturbed as king over the lower animal creation, though it has been driven inwards from the more settled portions of the coast-land; while it is now confined, its power is divided with that of the tiger. The leopard, serval, caracal, chaus, and civet cat (the locality of the true civet being North Africa), are the other principal representatives of the cat tribe. The herpestes or ichneumons have the same distribution as the civets; the species which destroys the eggs of the crocodile is found in Egypt and the North of Africa.

Of wild horses the asinine group is characteristic of Asia, and the hippotigrine of Africa. The quagga, exclusively African, inhabits the most southern parts of the continent, and is scarcely found north of the Orange river, but occurs in great herds, associated with the white-tailed gnu; the zebra (Equus Burchellii), or zebra of the plains, is widely distributed over Africa, from the limit of the quagga to Abyssinia and the west coast; the zebra of the mountains (Equus zebra), more completely striped than the rest, is only known in South Africa. The true onager or aboriginal wild ass is indigenous to North-East Africa and the island of Socotra. A species inhabiting the high land of Abyssinia is distinct from these. The horse, domesticated in other parts of Africa, excepting the region of forests, is not found in the eastern intertropical region; and, for some cause not yet clearly ascertained, it appears to be impossible to acclimatise it there. The single humped camel or dromedary is used over the whole of North Africa, as far south and west as the river Niger and Lake Chad. The Indian buffalo has spread by introduction to North Africa; the Cape buffalo, a species peculiar to Africa, reaches as far north as a line from Guinea to Abyssinia; the Bos Brachycerus is a species peculiar to West Africa, from Senegal to the Gaboon. Of sheep, the Ovis Tragelaphus is peculiar to North Africa; the Ibex goat extends into Abyssinia. The family of the antelopes is essentially African, five-sixths of the species composing it being natives of that country, and chiefly of the portion lying south of the Sahara, occurring in dense herds. Lastly, the giraffe, one of the most celebrated and characteristic of African quadrupeds, ranges from the limits of the Cape Colony as far as the Sahara and Nubia.

Of Edentata the seven species known to occur in Africa are also peculiar to it. The aardwark (Orycteropus capensis) is essentially burrowing in its habits; and the burrows formed by these animals are the source of frequent danger to the waggons and horses of the Cape colonists.

A genus of moles is met with in South Africa, but is not found in the tropical regions. The Cape or gilded mole, chryso-chlore, is so called from its iridescent glossy fur; two or three species of hedgehog occur in the continent, and Madagascar has a peculiar family resembling these in appearance, but without the power of rolling up into a ball for defence. Bats are numerous in Africa, but few are peculiar to it.

Of Rodents the burrowing kinds prevail. The African species of porcupine are known in the northern and western coast-lands and in South-Eastern Africa. The hyrax extends over Eastern Africa and a portion of the west coast. Hares are only known in the countries north of the Sahara and in the Cape colony. Among squirrels, those with bristles or spines in the fur are peculiar to the southern regions of the continent.

The ornithology of Africa presents a close analogy in many of its species to those of Europe and South Asia. Thus, on its northern coasts, there is scarcely a single species to be found which does not also occur in the other countries bordering on the Mediterranean. The ornithology of the region of the Nile and the northern coasts is identified with that of Arabia, Persia, and Spain. The deserts are inhabited by species adapted to its solitudes; while Southern Africa presents different species.

The ostrich, the hugest of birds, which has been described as the feathered camel, or the giraffe among birds, is found in almost every part of Africa. But its chief home is the desert and the open plains; mountainous district it avoids, unless pressed by hunger. The beautiful white feathers, so highly prized by the ladies of Europe, are found in the wings of the male bird. The chase is not without its difficulties, and it required the greatest care to get within musket-shot of the bird, owing to its constant vigilance and the great distance to which it can see. The fleetest horse, too, will not overtake it unless stratagem be adopted to tire it out. If followed up too eagerly, the chase of the ostrich is not destitute of danger; for the huntsman has sometimes had his thigh-bone broken by a single stroke from the leg of a wounded bird.

The large messenger or secretary-bird, which preys upon serpents and other reptiles, is one of the most remarkable African birds. It is common near the Cape, and is not seldom domesticated. Of gallinaceous fowls, adapted to the poultry-yard, Africa possesses but a single genus, the guinea-hens, which, however, are found in no other part of the world. These birds, of which there are three or four distinct species, go in large flocks of 400 or 500, and are most frequently found among underwood in the vicinity of ponds and rivers. There are, besides, many species of partridges and quails in different parts of Africa. Water fowl of various species are also abundant on the lakes, and rivers, as are likewise various species of owls, falcons, and vultures, the latter of which are highly useful in consuming the offal and carrion, which might otherwise taint the air and produce disease.

Among the smaller birds of Africa are many species remarkable for the gaudiness and brilliancy of their plumage, or the singularity of their manners and economy. Of the former kind may be mentioned the sunbirds, the lamprotornis, the bee-eaters, the rollers, the plantain-eaters, the parrots, the halcyons, and numerous smaller birds that swarm in the forests. Of the latter kind it will be sufficient to mention the honey-cuckoo (Cuculus indicator).

Though Africa is not exempt from the scourge of venomous or dangerous reptiles, still it has comparatively fewer than other tropical countries, owing to the dryness of the climate. The reptiles harboured by the desert regions consist chiefly of harmless lizards and serpents of a small size, though often venomous. The frog and tortoise tribes are represented in but few species and numbers.

The most important among the reptiles is the crocodile, which inhabits nearly all the large rivers and lakes within the tropics, and is still abundant in the Nile below the first cataract.

The chameleon is common in Africa. Among the venomous species of snakes are the purple naja, the cerastes or horned viper, the ringed naja, and the darting viper.

Edible fish are found almost everywhere in great vicinity and quantity. The fresh waters of Egypt produce the gigantic bishir, the coffres, and numerous species of the pimelodes. Many varieties of fish exist in the great interior lakes; five large species found in the Tanganyika are described by Burton. The greater number of the fish of the Red Sea resemble the saxatiles of the warm seas of Asia. On the west coasts are found the fish belonging to equatorial latitudes, while the shores of the Mediterranean produce those of France and Spain. The seas of the southern extremity possess the species common to the latitudes of the antarctic, south of the three great capes. The fish of the east coast are the same as those of the Indian Sea.

Of the insect tribes Africa also contains many thousand different kinds. The locust has been, from time immemorial, the proverbial scourge of the whole continent; scorpions, scarcely less to be dreaded than noxious serpents, are everywhere abundant; and the zebub, or fly, one of the instruments employed by the Almighty to punish the Egyptians of old, is still the plague of the low and cultivated districts. In the interior of Africa a venomous fly occurs in certain regions of the south and east, which is fatal to nearly all domestic animals. It is called tsetse (Glossina morsitans), and its size is almost that of the common blue fly which settles on meat; but the wings are larger. On the absence of this insect greatly depended the success of recent explorers in that quarter, as, where it appeared, their cattle infallibly fell victims to its bite. There are large tribes abounds in their country. Its bite is not, however, dangerous to man; wild animals likewise are undisturbed by it. The termites or white ants are likewise a scourge to the country where they occur in great numbers. This destructive creature devours everything in the shape of wood, leather, cloth, &c., that falls in its way; and they march together in such swarms, that the devastation they commit is almost incredible.

Of the class of zoophytes, the brilliant polypi of every variety, and madrepores, abound on the coasts of Africa. The shores of the Mediterranean produce the finest coral, and those of the Red Sea bristle with extensive reefs of the same mollusca.

From the shores of the Mediterranean to about the latitude of 20° N., the population of Africa consists largely of tribes not originally native to the soil, but of Arabs and Turks, planted by conquest, with a considerable number of Jews, the children of dispersion; and the more recently introduced French. The Berbers of the Atlas region, the Tuaricks and Tibbus of the Sahara, and the Copts of Egypt, may be viewed as the descendants of the primitive stock, while those to whom the general name of Moors is applied, are perhaps of mixed descent, native and foreign. From the latitude stated to the Cape Colony, tribes commonly classed together under the title of the Ethiopic or Negro family are found, though many depart very widely from the peculiar physiognomy of the Negro, which is most apparent in the natives of the Guinea coast. In the Cape Colony, and on its borders, the Hottentots form a distinct variety in the population of Africa, most closely resembling the Mongolian races of Asia.

The Copts, or as they are correctly pronounced, either Ckoobt or Ckibt, are considered to be the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. They do not now compose more than one sixteenth part of the population of Egypt, their number not exceeding 145,000, about 10,000 of whom reside at Cairo. Conversions to the Mohammedan faith, and intermarriages with the Moslems, have occasioned this decrease in their numbers; to which may be added the persecutions which they endured from their Arabic invaders and subsequent rulers. They were forced to adopt distinctions of dress, and they still wear a turban of a black or blue, or a grayish or light brown colour, in contradistinction to the red or white turban. In some parts of Upper Egypt there are villages exclusively inhabited by the Copts. Their complexion is somewhat darker than that of the Arabs, their foreheads flat, and their hair of a soft and woolly character; their noses short, but not flat; mouths wide, and lips thick; the eyes large, and bent upwards in an angle like those of the Mongols; their cheek-bones high, and their beards thin. They are not an unmixed race, their ancestors in the earlier ages of Christianity having intermarried with Greeks, Nubians, and Abyssinians. With the exception of a small proportion, the Copts are Christians of the sect called Jacobites, Eutychians, Monophysites, and Monothelites, whose creed was condemned by the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451. They are extremely bigoted, and bear a bitter hatred to all other Christians; they are of a sullen temper, extremely avaricious, great dissemblers, ignorant, and faithless. They frequently indulge in excessive drinking; but in their meals, their mode of eating, and the manner in which they pass their hours of leisure, which is chiefly in smoking their pipes and drinking coffee, they resemble the other inhabitants of the country. Most of the Copts in Cairo are employed as secretaries and accountants, or tradesmen; they are chiefly engaged in the government offices; and as merchants, goldsmiths, silversmiths, jewellers, architects, builders, and carpenters, they are generally considered more skilful than the Moslems. The Coptic language is now understood by few persons, and the Arabic being employed in its stead, it may be considered as a dead language.

The countries above Egypt are inhabited by two tribes of people resembling each other in physical characters, but of distinct language and origin. One is, perhaps, the aboriginal or native, the other a foreign tribe. Dr Prichard terms them Eastern Nubians, or Nubians of the Red Sea, and Nubians of the Nile, or Berberines. All these tribes are people of a red-brown complexion, their colour in some instances approaching to black, but still different from the ebony hue of the Eastern negroes. Their hair is often frizzled and thick, and is described as even woolly; yet it is not precisely similar to the hair of the negroes of Guinea. The Eastern Nubians are tribes of roving people who inhabit the country between the Nile and the Red Sea; the northern division of this race are the Abadeh, who reach northward in the eastern desert as far as Kosseir, and, towards the parallel of Deir, border on the Bishari. The Bishari reach thence towards the confines of Abyssinia. The latter are extremely savage and inhospitable; they are said to drink the warm blood of living animals; they are for the most part nomadic, and live on flesh and milk. They are described as a handsome people, with beautiful features, fine expressive eyes, of slender and elegant forms; their complexion is said to be a dark brown, or a dark chocolate colour. The Barábra or Berberines are a people well known in Egypt, whither they resort as labourers from the higher country of the Nile. They inhabit the valley of that name from the southern limit of Egypt to Sennaar. They are a people distinct from the Arabs and all the surrounding nations. They live on the banks of the Nile; and wherever there is any soil, they plant date-trees, set up wheels for irrigation, and sow durra and some ETHNOLOGY.] A FRIG A 261 leguminous plants. At Cairo, whither many of this race resort, they are esteemed for their honesty. They profess Islam. The Barabra are divided into three sections by their dialects, which are those of the Nuba, the Kenous, and the Dongolawi. According to Dr Prichard, it is pro bable that the Berberines may be an offset from the original stock which first peopled Egypt and Nubia. The country of the Nubians is limited on the west by that of the Tibbus, who are spread over the eastern por tions of the Sahara, as far as Fezzan and Lake Chad. Dr Latham considers it probable that their language belongs to the Nubian class. They inhabit the locality of the ancient Libyans or Libyes. Their colour is not uniform. In some it is quite black, but many have copper-coloured faces. They are slim and well made, have high cheek bones, the nose sometimes flat like that of the negro, and sometimes aquiline. Their mouth is in general large, but their teeth fine. Their lips are frequently formed like those of Europeans ; their eyes are expressive, and their hair, though curled, not woolly. The females are especially distinguished by a light and elegant form, and in their walk and erect manner of carrying themselves are very striking. Their feet and ankles are delicately formed, and not loaded with a mass of brass or iron, as is the practice in other countries of Northern Africa, but have merely a light anklet of polished silver or copper, sufficient to show their jetty skin to more advantage ; and they also wear neat red slippers. The Tibbus are chiefly a pastoral people. They keep horses, cattle, sheep, and goats, but camels constitute their principal riches. The villages of the Tibbus are very regularly built in a square, with a space left on the north and south faces of the quadrangle for the use of the cattle. The huts are entirely of mats, which exclude the sun, yet admit both the light and the air. The interior of these habitations is singularly neat : clean wooden bowls for the preservation of milk, each with a cover of basket-work, are hung against their walls. They are greatly exposed to predatory incursions into their country by the enemies who surround them. The Tibbus of Tibesti are described by Dr Nachtigal as of medium stature, well made, of elegant though muscular frame ; in colour they vary between a clear bronze and black.: the greater number are dark bronze-coloured, yet without the slightest trace of what is generally recognised as the negro physiognomy. They carry on a considerable traffic in slaves between Sudan, Fezzan, and Tripoli. " All that is not Arabic in the kingdom of Marocco," says Dr Latham, " all that is not Arabic in the French provinces of Algeria, and all that is not Arabic in Tunis, Tripoli, and Fezzan, is Berber. The language, also, of the ancient Cyrenaica, indeed the whole country bordering the Mediterranean, between Tripoli and Egypt, is Berber. The extinct language of the Canary Isles was Berber ; and, finally, the language of the Sahara is Berber. The Berber languages, in their present geographical localities, are essen tially inland languages. As a general rule, the Arabic is the language for the whole of the sea-coast from the Delta of the Nile to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Straits of Gibraltar to the mouth of the Senegal." The Berber nation is one of great antiquity, and from the times of the earliest history has been spread over the same extent of country as at present ; the ancient Numidian and Mauritania!! names of Sallust, and other writers, have a meaning in the modern Berber. It has affinities with the Semitic languages. In the northern parts of Atlas these people are called Berbers ; in the southern tracts they are the Shuluh or Shelhas. In the hilly country belonging to Tunis, the Kabyles; in Mount Auress, the Showiah; and in the Desert, the Tuarick, all belong to the same group. The mountains of Atlas are said to be inhabited by more than twenty different tribes, carrying on perpetual warfare against each other. They are very poor, and make plun dering excursions in quest of the means of supporting life. They are described as an athletic, strong-featured people, accustomed to hardships and fatigue. Their only covering is a woollen garment without sleeves, fastened round the waist by a belt. The Shuluh, who are the mountaineers of the Northern Atlas, live in villages of houses made of stone and mud, with slate roofs, occasionally in tents, and even in caves. They are chiefly huntsmen, but cultivate the ground and rear bees. They are described as lively, intelligent, well- formed, athletic men, not tall, without marked features, and with light complexions. The Kabyles, or Kabaily, of the Algerian and Tunisian territories, are the most indus trious inhabitants of the Barbary States, and, besides till age, work the mines contained in their mountains, and obtain lead, iron, and copper. They live in huts made of the branches of trees and covered with clay, which resemble the magalia of the old Numidians, spread in little groups over the sides of the mountains, and preserve the grain, the legumes, and other fruits, which are the produce of their husbandry, in mattoures, or conical excavations in the ground. They are of middle stature ; their complexion is brown, and sometimes nearly black. The Tuarick are a people spread in various tribes through the greater portion of the Sahara. The expedition under Richardson, Barth, and Overweg, who traversed and ex plored a great portion of the Tuarick territories, has greatly added to our knowledge of these people. The following are the names and localities of the principal tribes : 1. Tanelkum, located in Fezzan. fOuraghen, family of Shafou, located 2. Azghers, < Emanghasatan, of Hateetah, V , Q-, { Amana, of Jabour, J a 3. Aheethanaran, the tribe of Janet. 4. Hagar (Ahagar), pure Hagars and Maghatah. They occupy the tract between Ghat, Tuat, and Timbuktu. 5. Sagamaram, located on the route from Aisou to Tuat. 6. Kailouees, including the Kailouees proper, the Kaltadak, and the Kalfadai . 7. Kilgris, including the Kilgris proper, the Iteesan, and the Ashraf. These and the tribes under the preceding head inhabit the kingdom of Ahir. 8. Oulimad, tribes surrounding Timbuktu in great num bers. This, probably identical with the Sorghou, is the largest and most powerful tribe, while the Tanelkums are the smallest and weakest. The various tribes are very different in their characters, but they are all fine men, tall, straight, and handsome. They exact a tribute from all the caravans traversing their country, which chiefly furnishes them with the means of subsistence. They are most abstemious, their food consist ing principally of coarse brown bread, dates, olives, and water. Even on the heated desert, where the thermometer generally is from 90 to 120, they are clothed from head to foot, and cover the face up to the eyes with a black or coloured handkerchief. The Moors who inhabit large portions of the empire of Moors. Marocco, and are spread all along the Mediterranean coast, are a mixed race, grafted upon the ancient Mauritanian stock; whence their name. After the conquest of Africa by the Arabs they became mixed with Arabs ; and having conquered Spain in their turn, they intermarried with the natives of that country, whence, after a possession of seven centuries, they were driven back to Mauritania. They are a handsome race, having much more resemblance to Europeans and western Asiatics than to Arabs or Berbers, although their language is Arabic, that is, the Mogrebiu dialect, which differs considerably from the Arabic in 262 A F K I C A [ETHNOLOGY. Arabia, and even in Egypt. They arc an intellectual people, and not altogether unlettered ; but they are cruel, revengeful, and blood-thirsty, exhibiting but very few traces of that nobility of mind and delicacy of feeling and taste which graced their ancestors in Spain. The history of the throne of Marocco, of the dynastic revolutions at Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, is written with blood ; and among the pirates who infested the Mediterranean they were the worst. Their religion is the Mohammedan. They are temperate in their diet and simple in their dress, except the richer classes in the principal towns, where the ladies literally cover themselves with silk, gold, and jewels, while the men indulge to excess their love of fine horses -and splendid arms. They generally lead a settled life as mer chants, mechanics, or agriculturists, but there are also many wandering tribes. They exhibit considerable skill and taste in dyeing, and in the manufacture of swords, saddlery, leathernware, gold and silver ornaments. At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, the Moorish department contained several articles which were greatly admired. The Moors. along the coast of Marocco still carry on piracy by means of armed boats. At two different periods, separated from each other by perhaps a thousand years, Africa was invaded by Arabic tribes, which took a lasting possession of the districts they conquered, and whose descendants form no inconsiderable portion of the population of North and Central Africa, while their language has superseded all others as that of civilisation and religion. Of the first invasion more has been said under the head "Abyssinians." The second was that effected by the first successors of Mahomet, who con quered Egypt, and subsequently the whole north of Africa as far as the shores of the Atlantic, in the course of the first century of the Hegira, or the seventh of the Christian era. As regards language, Egypt is now an entirely Arabic country, although in many other respects the P ellahs are totally different from the peasants in Arabia. But there are also several tribes of true Arabic descent scattered about from the high lands of Abyssinia down over Nubia and Egypt, and westward over the central provinces of Kordofan, Darfur, "VVaday, and Bornu. Others wander in the Libyan deserts and the Great Sahara, as well as in the states of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, leading a similar life with the Kabyles, but constituting a totally distinct race. Others, again, dwell in the empire of Marocco, among whom those along the shores of the Atlantic are notorious for their predatory habits and ferocious character. In many places Arabic adventurers have succeeded in subduing native tribes of every nationality, over which they rule as sovereign lords ; and on the coast of Zanzibar resides an Arabic royal dynasty. Many of the smaller islands to the north of Madagascar are inhabited by Arabs, and traces of them have been discovered in Madagascar itself. The African Arabs are not all alike in features and colour of skin, the differences being attributable to some of them having intermarried with natives, while others preserved the purity of their blood. Jews. The early settlements of the Jews in Egypt are facts universally known. Under the Ptolemies, large numbers of them settled at Alexandria and in Cyrenaica, and after the destruction of Jerusalem they rapidly spread over the whole of the Roman possessions in Africa; many also took refuge in Abyssinia. King Philip II. having driven them out of Spain, many thousands of families took refuge on the opposite coast of Africa. They are now numerous in all the larger towns in the north, where they carry on the occupation of merchants, brokers, &c., the trade with Europe being mostly in their hands. They live in a state of great degradation, except in Algiers, where the French restored them to freedom and independence. They have acquired much wealth, and although compelled to hide their riches from the cupidity of their rulers, they lose no opportunity of showing them whenever they can do so without risk of being plundered, fear and vanity being characteristic features of their character. The Jewesses in Marocco and Algiers are of remarkable beauty. Ever since the conquest of Egypt by Sultan Selim, and Turks, the establishment of Turkish pashalics in Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, Turks have settled in the north of Africa; and as they were the rulers of the country, whose numbers were always on the increase on account of the incessant arrivals of Turkish soldiers and officials, the Turkish became, and still is, the language of the different governments. Properly speak ing, however, they are not settled, but only encamped in Africa, and hardly deservea place among the African nations. Not all the inhabitants of the country called Abyssinia Abys- are Abyssinians; nor are the real Abyssinians all of the same origin, being a mixed race, to the formation of which several distinct nations have contributed. The primitive stock is of Ethiopian origin, but, as their language clearly shows, was at an early period mixed with a tribe of the Himyarites from the opposite coast of Arabia, who, in their turn, were ethnologically much more closely con nected with the Hebrews than with the Joctanides, or the Arabs properly speaking. In the age of the Egyptian Ptolemies, and after the destruction of Jerusalem, Jews settled in Abyssinia in such numbers, that not only their religion spread among the inhabitants, but the Hebrew language became mixed with the Abyssinian as it then was. Hence the surprising analogy between the principal Abyssinian languages, viz., the Gheez in Tigre, and the Amharic in Amhara, with the Hebrew. The uninterrupted intercourse with Arabia, and the immigration of several Arabic tribes, also contributed towards the apparently Semitic aspect of the present Abyssinian language. A large portion of Abyssinia having been occupied by Galla and other tribes, we shall here only dwell on the original Abyssinians. They inhabit a large tract, extending from the upper course of the Blue River, north as far as the Red Sea, and some isolated districts in the south and south-east. To the west of them are the Agau Abyssinians, a different tribe, whose idiom, however, is the common language of the lower classes in Tigre and Amhara also. Abyssinia was once a large and powerful kingdom, but the Galla having conquered the whole south of it, it gradually declined until the king or emperor became a mere shadow, in whose name several vassal princes exercise an unlimited power each in his own territory. Owing to their jealousy and mutual fears, war seldom ceases among the inhabitants. The Christian religion was introduced into Abyssinia in the first centuries after Christ ; but whatever its condition might have been in former times, it now presents a de graded mixture of Christian dogmas and rites, Jewish observances, and heathenish superstition. Yet of Judaism, which was once so powerful, but feeble traces are extant, while the Mohammedan religion is visibly on the increase. European missionaries have been, and still are very active among them, but their efforts have been crowned only with partial success. The Abyssinians, the Gallas being excluded from that denomination, are a fine strong race, of a copper hue, more or less dark, and altogether dif ferent from the Negroes, with whom, however, they have frequently been confounded, because they were called a black people. Their noses are nearly straight, their eyes beautifully clear, yet languishing, and their hair is black and crisp, but not woolly. They are on the whole a bar barous people, addicted to the grossest sensual pleasures ; and their priests, among whom marriage is customary, are little better than the common herd of the people. They live in huts, a large assemblage of which forms a so-called ETHNOLOGY. 1 A F li 1 C A 263 town; and although they possess some solid constructions of stone, such as churches and bridges, it appears that these were built by the Portuguese, the ruins at Axum and other places belonging to a much earlier period, when the country undoubtedly enjoyed a higher civilisation than at present. Owing to the influence exercised upon them during the last thirty years by European missionaries and travellers, their conduct towards strangers is less rude than it used to be at the time of Bruce. It is a remarkable fact that, not withstanding the low state of their religion, the Christians in Abyssinia are not allowed to keep slaves, although they may purchase them for the purpose of selling them again, ithiopic. This extensive race comprehends by far the greater num ber of African nations, extending over the whole of Middle and South Africa, except its southernmost projection to wards the Cape of Good Hope. A line drawn from the mouth of the Senegal in the west to Cape Jerdaffun in the east, forms its northern limits almost with geometrical accuracy, few Ethiopic tribes being found to the north of it. All the members of this race, however, are not Negroes. The latter are only one of its numerous offshoots; but between the receding forehead, the projecting cheek-bones, the thick lips of the Negro of Guinea, and the more straight configuration of the head of a Galla in Abyssinia, there are still many striking analogies ; and modern philology hav ing traced still greater analogies, denoting a common origin, among the only apparently disconnected languages of so many thousands of tribes, whose colour presents all the hues between the deepest black and the yellow brown, it is no longer doubtful that the Negro, the Galla, the Somali, and the Kaffre, all belong to the same ethnological stock. The principal Negro nations, as we know them, are the Mandingoes, who are numerous, powerful, and not uncivi lised, in Senegambia, and farther inland, around the head waters of the Quorra, where they have established a great number of kingdoms and smaller sovereignties. The inland trade is chiefly in their hands. They are black, with a mix ture of yellow, and their hair is completely woolly. The Wolofs or Yolofs, whose language is totally different from those of their neighbours, are the handsomest and blackest of all Negroes, although they live at a greater distance from the equator than most of the other black tribes, their prin cipal dwelling-places being between the Senegal and the Gambia, along the coast of the Atlantic. They are a mild and social people. The Foulalis or Fellatalis occupy the central parts of Soudan, situated in the crescent formed by the course of the Quorra, and also large tracts to the south east, as far as the equator west to the Senegal, and east till beyond Lake Chad. Their colour, as a rule, is black, inter mixed, however, with a striking copper hue, some of them being hardly more dark than gipsies. They are one of the most remarkable nations in Africa, very industrious, live in commodious and clean habitations, and are mostly Moham medans. A distinction was formerly made between the Foulahs of Senegambia and the Fellatahs of Central Africa, but it has since been ascertained that they belong to the same stock, and speak the same language. The hair of the Foulahs is much less woolly than that of other Negroes. Of the prin cipal nations in Guinea, among whom the true Negro type is particularly distinct, especially around the Bight of Benin, are the Feloops, near the Casamanfa, very black, yet hand some; and the Ashanti, of the Amina race, who surpass all their neighbours in civilisation, and the cast of whose features differs so much from the Negro type that they are said to be more like Indians than Africans ; although this is perhaps only true of the higher orders. They are still in possession of a powerful kingdom. The country behind the Slave Coast is occupied by tribes akin to the Dahomeh on the coast. In South Guinea we meet three principal races, namely, the Congo, the Abunda, and the Benguela Ne groes, who are divided into a variety of smaller tribes, with whom we are much less acquainted than with the northern Negroes, although the Portuguese have occupied this coast for upwards of three centuries. The Wamasai and Wok- Wama wavi, possibly of Abyssinian stock, are a remarkable race and V of wild nomad hunters, who occupy the high plateau which ^ rises between the coast-land and the Victoria Nyanza, extend ing from the equator southward to the route which leads from Zanzibar to the Tanganyika Lake. They are the terror of the more settled inhabitants of the surrounding countries, and occasionally make raids down even to the coast-land behind Mombas. The next great branch of the Ethiopic race comprehends the Galla, who occupy an immense tract G-al a. in Eastern Africa, from Abyssinia as far as the fourth degree of S. latitude, on the coast inward from Mombas. Our knowledge of them is chiefly confined to those Gallas who conquered Abyssinia. With regard to their physical con formation, they stand between the Negro of Guinea and the Arab and Berber. Their countenances are rounder than those of the Arabs, their noses are almost straight, and their hair, though strongly frizzled, is not so woolly as that of the Negro, nor are their lips quite so thick. Their eyes are small (in which they again differ from the Abyssinians), deeply set, but very lively. They are a strong, large, almost bulky people, whose colour varies between black and brownish, some of their women being remarkably fair, considering the race they belong to. An interesting tribe of them has g mal lately been brought to the knowledge of Europeans, the Somali, originally Arabs, who have advanced from the southern shores of the Gulf of Aden since the 15th century, and now occupy the greater portion of the East African pro montory wedging into the Galla region, and almost dividing that country into two distinct portions. For the most part they pursue a wandering and pastoral life. In the central regions of the continent the negroid Negro tribes, which are classed under the general name of tr ibes. Wanyamwezi, occupying the plateau south of the Vic toria and east of the Tanganyika Lakes, have been made known by Burton and subsequent travellers ; round the west and north of the Victoria are several distinct king doms, the chief being those of Karague and Uganda, traversed by Speke and Grant ; in the region west of the Upper Nile the countries of the Jur, Dor, and Bongo tribes have been explored by Dr Schweinfurth, and he has passed beyond the watershed of the Nile into a new basin, where he found the Niamniam and Monbuttu tribes. Dr Livingstone, in his latest journey, has entered the country of the Manyuema tribes, west of Tanganyika, in the heart of the continent ; these he describes as a fine, tall handsome race, superior alike to the slaves seen at Zanzibar and the typical negro of the west coast; exceedingly numerous, and living in a primitive condition, utterly igno rant of the outer world. The Balunda race of Negroes occupy a great area of South Central Africa, and have two ancient and powerful kingdoms of Muropua and Lunda, the former ruled over by the hereditary "Muata" or chief Hianvo, who has his capital near the Cassabi tributary of the Congo, and the latter by the Hianvo s vassal, the Cazembe, whose palace is near the Luapula river, south-west of Lake Tanganyika. Kibakoe or Quiboque and Lobal, south-west of the kingdom of Hianvo, are the chief states on the borders of Angola and Benguela ; towards the Nyassa lake, south east from the Cazembe s dominions, the Maravi tribe is per haps the most powerful, and beyond the Nyassa that of the Wahiao is the chief. The Makololo tribe, occupying the cen tral portion of the Zambeze basin, is of southern origin, and forms an intermediate stage between the Negro and Kaffre. The Kaffres, who, together with the tribes most akin to Kaffres them, occupy the greater portion of South Africa, especially the eastern portions, have some analogy with Europeans in 264 AFRICA [ETHNOLOGY. their features but they are woolly haired, and while some are almost black, others are comparatively fair, although some of their tribes might have been mixed with the East ern Negroes. They have been very wrongly classed with the Negroes. They are a strong, muscular, active people, addicted to plunder and warfare. The Eastern Kaffres, among whom the Amakosah and Amazulah are best known to us, on account of their frequent invasions of the Cape Colony, are much more savage than the western and north ern, or the Bechuana and Sichuana tribes. All Kaffres are pastoral, keeping large herds of cattle ; but the last-named tribes inhabit large towns, well-built houses, cultivate the ground carefully, and exhibit every appearance of being capable of entire civilisation. The word Kaffre, or Kafir, as it ought to be written, is Arabic, and was first applied by the Europeans to the inhabitants of the coast of Mozam bique, because they were so called by the Mohammedans, in whose eyes they were Kafirs, that is infidels. We conclude this sketch with the Hottentot race, which is entirely different from all the other races of Africa, Where they originally came from, and how they happened to be hemmed in and confined entirely to this remote corner of the earth, is a problem not likely to be ever satisfactorily solved. The only people to whom the Hottentot has been thought to bear a resemblance, are the Chinese or Malays, or their original stock the Mongols. Like these people they have the broad forehead, the high cheek-bones, the oblique eye, the thin beard, and the dull yellow tint of complexion, resembling the colour of a dried tobacco leaf ; but there is a difference with regard to the hair, which grows in small tufts, harsh, and rather wiry, covering the scalp somewhat like the hard pellets of a shoe-brush. The women, too, have a peculiarity in their physical conforma tion, which, though occasionally to be met with in other nations, is not universal, as among the Hottentots. Their constitutional "bustles" sometimes grow to three times the size of those artificial stuffings with which our fashionable ladies have disfigured themselves. Even the females of the diminutive Bosjesmen Hottentots, who frequently perish of hunger in the barren mountains, and are reduced to skele tons, have the same protuberances as the Hottentots of the plains. It is not known even whence the name of Hotten tot proceeds, as it is none of their own. It has been con- jestured that hot and tot frequently occurring in their singu lar language, in which the monosyllables are enunciated with a palatic clacking with the tongue, like that of a hen, may have given rise to the name, and that the early Dutch settlers named them hot-en-tot. They call themselves qui- qucc, pronounced with a clack. They are a lively, cheerful, good-humoured people, and by no means wanting in intel lect; but they have met with nothing but harsh treatment I since their first connection with Europeans. Neither Bar tholomew Diaz, who first discovered, nor Vasco de Gama, who first doubled, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any of the ^ubsequent Portuguese navigators, down to 1509, had much communication with the natives of this southern angle of 1 Africa ; but in the year above mentioned, Francisco d Al- meyda, viceroy of India, having landed on his return at Saldanha (now Table) Bay, was killed, with about twenty of his people, in a scuffle wtih the natives. To avenge his death, a Portuguese captain, about three years afterwards, is said to have landed a piece of ordnance loaded with grape shot, as a pretended present to the Hottentots. Two ropes were attached to this fatal engine ; the Hottentots poured down in swarms. Men, women, and children flocked round the deadly machine, as the Trojans did round the wooden horse, "funemque manu contingere gaudent." The brutal Portuguese fired off the piece, and viewed with savage delight the mangled carcasses of the deluded people. The Dutch effected their ruin by gratifying their propensity for brandy and tobacco, at the expense of their herds of cattle, on which they subsisted. Under the British sway they have received protection, and shown themselves not unworthy of it. They now possess property, and enjoy it in security. One of the most beautiful villages, and the neatest and best-cultivated gardens, belong to a large community of Hottentots, under the instruction and guidance of a few Moravian missionaries. These forlorn people are of Hottentot origin. Of them Buslimc also several tribes have been discovered much farther north, and intelligence has lately reached Europe, that between the Portuguese possessions, in the very centre of South Africa, there is a nation of dwarfish appearance who possess large herds, and who seem to belong to the original Bushmen stock. The island of Madagascar is inhabited by a race of Malay origin, exhibiting traces of Negro and Arabic mixture. The area and population of Africa and its divisions are Fopulat thus estimated: l .DIVISIONS. Area in English square miles. 1 Population. Average Density. No. to a sq. mile. NORTH AFRICA, .... 4,003,600 20,420,000 5 259,600 2 750 000 10 Algeria. . 258,300 2,921,146 11 45,700 2,000,000 43 Tripoli, with Barca and ) Fezzan, .... Egyptian territory, . . Sahara, The MOHAMMEDAN STATES of CENTRAL SOUDAN, . WESTERN SOUDAN, from the Senegal to the Lower Niger, including Upper Guinea, and .... French Senegamliia, . . Liberia, 344,400 659,100 2,436,500 631,000 818,600 96,530 9,580 750,000 8,000,000 4,000,000 38,800,000 38,500,000 209,162 718,000 2 12 1-6 61 47 2 72 3,880 180,000 47 British possessions, . . Portuguese possessions, . EAST AFRICA 17,100 35,880 1,595,000 577,313 8,500 29,700,000 34 0-2 18 158,400 3,000,000 19 SOUTH AFRICA, .... Portuguese ) East coast, territory, West coast, Cape Colony, .... Natal 1,966,000 382,000 312,500 221,310 17,800 16,000,000 300,000 9,000,000 682,600 269,362 8 0-8 29 3 15 Orange R. Free State, . Transvaal Republic, . . EQUATORIAL REGIONS, . . ISLANDS in the ATLANTIC ) 42,500 114,360 1,522,200 2,720 37,000 120,000 43,000,000 99,145 0-8 1 29 37 C. Verd Islands, . . . St Thomas and Principe, Fernando Po & Annobon, 1,650 454 488 38 67,347 19,295 5,590 400 42 42 11 10 47 6,860 145 Tristan da Cunha, . . ISLANDS in the INDIAN OCEAN, 45 233,870 1,700 53 6,000,000 3,000 1 25 2 Abd-el-Kuri, .... 64 616 100 380,000 2 616 Madagascar, .... Comoro Islands (with j Mayotta), . . . J The Arco Islands, &c., . 228,575 1,062 150 970 5,COO,000 64,600 209,737 22 64 216 Mauritius and its de- ) pendencies, . . . } DESERT of KALAHARI and the GREAT INLAND LAKES, .... 70S 783, 6 " ) 322,924 456 AFRICA, . . . 11,556,600 192,520,000 16 1 Compiled from the Tables in Behin and Wagner s Bevijlkej-ung d&r Erde. Gotha, 1872. STATES.] AFRICA 265 In the central forest regions of Africa, wherever com munications with the coast-land have been opened up, hunting the elephant for its tusks to barter with the traders appears to be the characteristic occupation, if any, beyond that of mere attention to the daily wants of life, is engaged in; and here the population may be considered as a settled one, living in villages in the more open spaces of the woods. A rudely agricultural state seems to mark the outer belt of negro land on each side of the equatorial zone, where the population is also more or less stationary. The arid regions of the Sahara and the Kalahari beyond have, on the other hand, a thinly scattered nomadic population, though here also the fertile wadys form lines of more permanent habita tion, and contain permanent towns and villages. Except ing in the immediate neighbourhood of the Mediterranean in Abyssinia, on a narrow margin of the coasts of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and in those parts which have been colonised by Europeans, or which came directly under their influence, society has remained in a barbarian state, and there remain great areas the inhabitants of which have as yet no knowledge of the outer world. Agriculture is conducted with little art The natural fertility of the soil in the well-watered districts supersedes the need of skill, while the production of the simplest manufactures is alone requisite, where the range of personal wants embraces few objects, and those of the humblest class. Wars, cruel and incessant, waged not for the sake of territory, but for the capture of slaves, form one of the most marked and deplorable features in the social condition of the African races. This practice, though not of foreign introduction, has been largely promoted by the cupidity of the Europeans and Transatlantic nations; and, unhappily, the efforts of private philanthropy, and the political arrangements of various governments, have not yet availed to terminate the hideous traffic in mankind, or abate the suffering entailed upon its victims. .eligion. In Religion, Christianity is professed in Abyssinia, and in Egypt by the Copts, but its doctrines and precepts are little understood and obeyed. Mohammedanism prevails in all Northern Africa, excepting Abyssinia, as far as a line passing through the Soudan, from the Gambia on the west to the confluence of the Quorra and Benue, and thence eastward, generally following the 10th parallel of N. lat. to the Nile below the junction of the Ghazal; thence south east, leaving the coast-land in the Mohammedan region, to Cape Delgado. In Marocco, Algeria, and Egypt, there is an admixture of Jews. Heathen Negroes and CafFre tribes extend southward over the continent from the line described above to the colonies in the southern extremity of the continent; and over this vast area the native mind is surrendered to superstitions of infinite number and character. In the Cape Colony Protestantism again pre vails, but with a strong intermixture of heathenism. The labours of Christian missionaries have, however, done much, especially in South Africa, towards turning the benighted Africans from idols to the living God. olitical In describing the political divisions of Africa, we shall ivisions. proceed from north to south. arbary. The country included under the general name of Barbary extends from the borders of Egypt on the east to the Atlantic on the west, and is bounded by the Mediterranean on the north, and by the Sahara on the south. It com prises the states of Marocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli. larocjo. Marocco, the most westerly state of Barbary, is thus named by the Europeans, but by the Arabs themselves Mogr -eb-el-Aksa, or "the extreme west." The eastern boundary was determined in the treaty with the French of 18th March 1845, by a line which, in the south, com mences east of the oasis Figueg, intersecting the desert of Angad, and reaching the Mediterranean at a point about 30 miles west of the French port Nemours. In the south Marocco embraces the oasis of Tuat and the Wady Draa. The power of the government of Marocco, which is despotic and cruel, as well as the population of the country, appear to have diminished greatly. Two-thirds of the country are independent of the Sultan s authority, and are held by mountain chiefs who defy his power. The trade of 1 the coast is maintained by European merchants. See MAROCCO. Algeria extends from Marocco in the west, to Tunis in Algeri; the east, and closely answers in its limits to the ancient kingdom of Numidia. The southern boundaries are not very definite, falling, as they do, within the boundless plains of the desert. See ALGIERS. Tunis is the smallest of the Barbary states. The con- Tunis, figuration of the surface is similar to that of Algeria, in three divisions, the " Tell," or fertile coast slopes, the steppes on the high lands, and the low-lying Sahara beyond. The highest peaks range between 4000 and 5000 feet. The southern plains comprise the land of dates (Belad- el-Jerid), and several extensive salt lakes. Tunis possesses but few rivers and streams, and springs are plentiful only in the mountainous regions. The climate is, upon the whole, salubrious, and is not of the same excessive character as that of Algeria; regular sea-breezes exercise an ameliorating influence both in sum mer and winter; frost is almost unknown, and snow never falls. During summer occasional winds from the south render the atmosphere exceedingly dry and hot The natural productions of the country are somewhat similar to those of the other Barbary states, but dates of the finest quality are more largely produced. The horses and dromedaries are of excellent breed, and the former are eagerly sought for the French army in Algeria. Bees are reared in great quantity, and coral fisheries are carried on. Of minerals lead, salt, and saltpetre are the most noticeable. The population consists chiefly of Mohammedan Moors and Arabs; the number of Jews is estimated at 45,000, and of Koman Catholics 25,000. The former have attained a higher degree of industry and civilisation than their brethren elsewhere; those of the latter who inhabit the central mountainous regions are nearly independent The government is vested in a hereditary bey, and has been conducted in peace and security for a number of years. From the year 1575 onwards, Tunis has been under the rule of Turkey; but by a firman of October 1871 the Sultan renounced the ancient tribute. The bey, who is styled " Possessor of the kingdom of Tunis," is confirmed in his position at Constantinople, and may neither enter into a Avar, nor conclude a treaty of peace, nor cede any part of his territory without the sanction of the Sultan. The Tunisian coinage bears the name of the Sultan, and the troops (3900 infantry and artillery, and 100 cavalry, form the regular army) are at the disposal of the Sublime Porte in time of war. In the interior of the country the bey has absolute power. The slave trade was abolished in 1842. The commerce of Tunis is considerable, but agriculture is in a backward state. The exports consist chiefly of wool, olive-oil, wax, honey, hides, dates, grain, coral, &c. The principal town is Tunis, situated on a shallow lake on the north coast It is the most important commercial place on the southern shores of the Mediterranean after Alexandria, and has a population of about 125,000. The site of the ancient Carthage is 1 3 miles from Tunis in the direction of Cape Bon. Tripoli, a regency of the Turkish empire, extends from Tripoli Tunis along the shores of the Mediterranean to the table land of Barca, which forms a separate province. Politically, it includes the pashalic of Fezzan, a country which, hi a physical point of view, belongs to the Sahara. Tripoli is the least favoured bv nature of the Barbary I- - 34 266 A F E I C A [STATES. states, possessing a great extent of sterile surface. Mr Richardson graphically describes the physiognomy of the country between the towns of Tripoli and Murzuk in eight zones: 1. The plain along the sea-shore, with the date- palm plantations and the sandhills; 2. The Gharian moun tains, with their olive and fig plantations, more favoured with rains than the other regions; 3. The limestone hills and broad valleys between the town of Kalubah and Ghareeah, gradually assuming the aridity of the Sahara as yo proceed southward ; 4. The Hamadah, an immense desert plateau, separating Tripoli from Fezzan; 5. The sandy valleys and limestone rocks between El-Hessi and Es-Shaty, where herbage and trees are found; G. The sand between Shiaty and El-Wady, piled in masses or heaps, and extend ing in undulating plains ; 7. The sandy valleys of El-Wady, covered with forests of date-palms; 8. The plateau of Murzuk, consisting of shallow valleys, ridges of low sand stone hills, and naked plains. These zones extend parallel with the Mediterranean shores through the greater portion of the country. A summit of the Jebel-es-Soda, or Black Mountains, midway between Tripoli and Murzuk, almost 2800 feet high, is supposed to be the culminating point of the regency. Rivers exist only periodically, and springs are exceedingly scarce. The climate is somewhat more subject to extremes than that of Tunis, especially in the interior, where burning heat is followed by excessive cold. As far south as Sokna snow occasionally falls. The climate of Murzuk is very unhealthy, and frequently fatal to Europeans. The natural products are very much like those of Tunis. Oxen and horses are small, but of good quality; the mules are of excellent breed. Locusts and scorpions are among the most noxious animals. Salt and sulphur are the chief minerals. The population is very thin. Arabs are the prominent race, besides which are Turks, Berbers, Jews, Tibbus, and Negroes. The country is governed by a pasha, subject to the Ottoman empire. The military force by which the Turks hold possession of this vast but thinly-peopled terri tory amounts to 4500 men. The commerce is not inconsiderable, and the inhabitants of Tripoli trade with almost every part of the Sahara, as well as the Soudan. At Murzuk there is a large annual market, which lasts from October to January. The ex ports of Tripoli are wheat, wax, ivory, ostrich feathers, madder, esparto grass, cattle, salt, and dates. Tripoli is the capital of the regency, and the largest town; it lies on the Mediterranean, surrounded by a fertile plain ; the number of inhabitants is about 30,000. Murzuk, the capital of Fezzan, has a mixed population of about 11,000 souls. The town of Ghadamis has about 7000 inhabitants. In 1869 the maritime plateau of Barca and the depressed region inland from it, which contains the oases of Aujila and Jalo, was formed into a separate government, depend ent directly upon Constantinople. This country is the seat of the ancient Greek Pentapolu of Bernice, Arsince, Barca, Apollonia, and Cyrene. Bengazi, the only place of importance, occupies the site of the first of these on the Mediterranean, and has from 6000 to 7000 inhabitants. Egypt occupies the north-eastern corner of Africa, and is remarkable for its ancient and sacred associations, and its wonderful monuments of human art. Egypt is a vast desert, the fertile portions susceptible of cultivation being confined to the Delta of the Nile and its narrow valley, a region celebrated in the most ancient historic documents for its singular fertility, and still pouring an annual surplus of grain into the markets of Europe. By the annual inundation of the Nile this region is laid under water, and upon its retirement the grain crops are sown in the layer of mud left behind it. Barren ranges of hills and elevated tracts occupy the land on both sides of the Nile, which is the only river of the country. The amount of its rise is a matter of extreme solicitude to the people, for should it pass its customary bounds a few feet, cattle are drowned, houses are swept away, and immense injury ensues; a falling short of the ordinary height, on the other hand, causes dearth and famine, according to its extent. The water of tho Nile is renowned for its agreeable taste and wholesome quality. In connection with the Nile is the Birket-el- Kerun, a salt lake. The climate is very hot and dry. Rain falls but seldom along the coasts, but the dews are very copious. The hot and oppressive winds, called khamsin and simooms, are a frequent scourge to the country; but the climate is, upon the whole, more salubrious than that of many other tropical countries. The natural products are not of great variety. The wild plants are but few and scanty, while those cultivated include all the more important kinds adapted to tropical countries; rice, wheat, sugar, cotton, indigo, are cultivated for export; dates, figs, pomegranates, lemons, and olives, are likewise grown. The doum-palm, which appears in Upper Egypt, is characteristic, as also the papyrus. The fauna is cha racterised by an immense number of waterfowl, flamingoes, pelicans, &c. The hippopotamus and crocodile, the two primeval inhabitants of the Nile, seem to be banished from the Delta, the latter being still seen in Upper Egypt. The cattle are of excellent breed. Large beasts of prey aru wanting; but the ichneumon of the ancients still exists. Bees, silkworms, and corals are noticeable. Minerals are scarce, natron, salt, and sulphur being the principal. The native Egyptians of Arab descent compose the great bulk of the people, the peasant and labouring class, and are termed Fellahs. Next in number, though compara tively few (145,000), are the Copts, descended from the old inhabitants of the country, the ancient Egyptians, but far from being an unmixed race. Tho Arabic Bedouin tribes, Negroes, European Christians (Greeks, Italians, French, Austrian, English), the Jews, and the dominant Turks, compose the remainder of the population. Egypt is formally a Turkish pashalic, but the hereditary pasha, by whom the government is conducted, and whose authority is absolute, is practically an independent prince. The government of Nubia and Kordofan is also conducted by the Pasha of Egypt, and recently the whole of the Nile valley, as far south as the equator, has been annexed by the Egyptian government. An army of about 14,000 men is maintained. The agriculture of Egypt has always been considerable, there being three harvests in the year. The industry is limited: one peculiar branch is the artificial hatching of eggs in ovens heated to the requisite temperature, a pro cess which has been handed down from antiquity, and is now chiefly carried on by the Copts. Floating bee-hives are also peculiar to the Nile. The commerce is extensive and important: the exports to Europe consist chiefly of cotton, flax, indigo, gum-arabic, ostrich feathers, ivory, senna, and gold. The country forms part of the great highway of traffic between Europe and Southern Asia. Railways, from the ports of Alexandria and Damietta in the Mediterranean, and from Suez on the Red Sea, unite at Cairo; and a railway now extends thence up the bank of the Nile to near the first cataract of the river at Assouan, in lat. 24 N. The Suez canal, uniting the Red Sea and the Medi- Suez cat: terranean, was begun in April 1859, and was opened for traffic ten years later, in November 1869. The cutting runs from the artificial harbour of Port Said on the Medi terranean, through the shallow lagoon of Menzalch, and STATES.] AFRICA 207 through, two smaller lakes with low sandhills between; nearer Suez a depressed area, in which several salt lakes formerly existed, has been filled up by water let in by the canal, and now forms a wide expanse of water. In length the canal is nearly 100 miles, and has a depth throughout of 26 feet, with a general width of 200 to 300 feet at the top of the banks and 72 feet at the bottom. Vessels are able to steam or be towed through the canal in sixteen hours from sea to sea. Extensive harbours and docks have been constructed both on the Mediterranean side and at Suez. The number of vessels which entered Port Said in 1871 was 1215, of 928,000 tons, exclusive of 87 war-ships. Egypt proper is divided into three sub-pashalics Bahari or Lower Egypt, Vostani or Middle Egypt, and Said or Upper Egypt. Cairo, on the east bank of the Nile, is the capital of Egypt, and is the largest town of Africa, containing 354,000 inhabitants: it has 400 mosques, and upwards of 130 minarets, some of them of rich and graceful architec ture, presenting at a distance an appearance singularly imposing. Alexandria, on the coast, is the emporium of the commerce with Europe, and has 220,000 inhabitants, among whom are 54,000 Europeans. Damietta has a population of 37,100; Rosetta of 18,300. Suez, on the northern extremity of the Bed Sea, is a small, ill-built town, but has assumed importance as a good port since the establishment of the overland route to India and the completion of the maritime canal. It has now nearly 14,000 inhabitants, of whom about 2500 are Europeans. Port Said has 8800 inhabitants, of whom one-half are foreigners. Nubia extends along the Red Sea, from Egypt to Abys sinia, comprising the middle course of the Nila The natural features of the country are varied; the northern portion consisting of a burning sterile wilderness, while the southern, lying within the range of the tropical rains, and watered by the Abyssinian affluents of the Nile, exhibits vegetation in its tropical glory, forests of arborescent grasses, timber-trees, and parasitical plants largely clothing the country. This latter territory, which may be called Upper Nubia, includes the region of ancient Meroe, situated in the peninsula formed by the Nile proper, the Blue River, and the Atbara, and comprises, further south, the recently extinguished modern kingdom of Sennaar. Nubia forms the link between the plain of Egypt and the high table-lands of Abyssinia ; its general physical character is that of a slightly ascending region. The lowest parts in Upper Nubia scarcely exceed an altitude of 1300 feet; Khartum, at the confluence of the Blue and White Rivers, being 1345 feet above the level of the sea. A chain of mountains and elevated land rises abruptly along the shores of the Red Sea, gradually sloping down to the valley of the Nile; the intermediate region being intersected by smaller ranges, groups of hills, and numerous wadys filled with sand. The spurs of the Abyssinian table-land, extending within the southern confines of Nubia, reach a height of 3000 feet. Besides the Nile, the country is watered by two other large rivers, its tributaries, the Bhar-el-Azrek or Blue River, and the Atbara or Takkazze, both being much alike in magnitude, and having their head-streams in the Abyssinian table-land. The climate of Nubia is tropical throughout, and the heat in the deserts of its central portions is not exceeded by that of any other part of the globe. The southern half of the country is within the influence of the tropical rains, the northern partakes the character of the almost rainless Sahara ; and while the latter is generally very salubrious, the former is a land of dangerous fevers, particularly in the plains subject to inundations. Such is the Kolla, a marshy and swampy region of great extent, situated along the foot of the Abyssinian Mountains, between the Blue River and the Takkazze. The northern region is poor in natural productions, but in the south the vegetation is most luxuriant ; palms form a prominent feature, and the monkey bread-tree attains its most colossal dimensions. The date -tree, dourra, cotton, and indigo are cultivated. The date-palm does not ex tend beyond the south of Abou-Egli, in lat. 18 36 . The elephant occasionally wanders as far as Sennaar ; the rhinoceros, lion, giraffe, and buffalo are more common. The waters are inhabited by crocodiles more ferocious than those of Egypt, and by huge hippopotami. The young hippopotamus brought to the Zoological Gardens of London in 1850, was captured in Niibia, in an island of the Nile, about 1800 miles above Cairo : no living specimen had been seen in Europe since the period when they were exhibited by the third Gordian in the Colosseum at Rome. Monkeys and antelopes are found in great numbers. The camel does not extend beyond the twelfth degree of latitude to the south. Ostriches roam over the deserts ; and among the reptiles, besides the crocodile, are large serpents of the python species, and tortoises. Of the numerous insects the most remarkable is the scarabseus of the ancient Egyp tians, still found in Sennaar. Of minerals Nubia possesses gold, silver, copper, iron, salt. In the inhabitants two principal varieties are recognised, the pure original population, and their descendants , mixed with other nations. The Berbevines inhabit the northern part, and the Bisharis the desert regions; the latter are the genuine Nubians, finely moulded and dark complexioned, supposed by some to agree more closely with the ancient Egyptians than the Copts, usually deemed their represen tatives. In the south-eastern part the true Negro element appears. Nubia, now a province under the pashalic of Egypt, con sisted formerly of a number of small and independent king doms. The Turkish conquest lasted from 1813 to 1822; in the latter years it was invaded and mercilessly ravaged by the army of Mahomet Ali, under his second son Ismayl, whose dreadful atrocities entailed a fearful fate upon him self, having been surprised when attending a nocturnal banquet, at some distance from his camp, and burned to death. The country is favourable for agriculture, which, how ever, is only carried on to a limited extent, by the women. Cattle are abundant, and the camels of the Bisharin and Ababde are famous for their enduring powers. Salt is largely exported from the shores of the Red Sea to India, and ivory, with other products of tropical Africa, forms a principal article of trade. Khartum, the capital of Nubia, the headquarters of the Egyptian government, and the chief seat of commerce, con tains a population variously estimated at from 20,000 to 50,000. It is a modern town, having been founded in 1821, and lies in a dry, flat, and unhealthy country, near the confluence of the two main branches of the Nile. It is in telegraphic communication with Cairo. Kordofan, on the western side of Nubia, lies between the Kordof parallels of 12 and 16, and between the meridians 29 and 32, containing about 30,000 square miles. It is a flat country, interspersed with a few hills, presenting in the dry season a desert with little appearance of vegetation, and in the rainy season a prairie, covered with luxuriant grass and other plants. The general elevation of the country is 2000 feet, and some of the hills attain a height of 3000. The altitude of El Obeid is 2150 feet. There are no permanent rivers in the country, and the natural products are similar to those of the adjoining regions of Nubia. The population consists of Negroes. This country wna. simultaneously with Nubia, made tributary to Egypt. The 268 AFRICA [STATES. commerce consists of gum-arabic, ivory, and gold, and is not inconsiderable. El Obeid, the chief town, is composed of several villages of mud-built houses, thatched with straw, containing about 12,000 inhabitants. byssinia. The boundaries of Abyssinia are somewhat uncertain; but confining it to the provinces actually under the govern ment of Christian or Mohammedan princes, it may be de scribed as extending from about 9 to 16 N. lat, and from 35 to 40 E. long. See ABYSSINIA. ,haran The Saharan countries extend from the Atlantic in the untries. west, to the Nilotic countries in the east, from the Barbary States in the north, to the basins of the Rivers Senegal and Kawara, and Lake Chad in the south. The area of this large space amounts to at least 2,000,000 square miles, or upwards of one-half of that of the whole of Europe. It is very scantily populated, but from our present defective knowledge of that region, the number of its inhabitants can be but roughly estimated. The physical configuration of the Sahara has already been indicated. Notwithstanding the proverbial heat, which is almost insupportable by day, there is often great cold at night, owing to the excessive radiation, promoted by the clearness of the sky. Rain is nearly, though not entirely absent, in this desolate region. It appears that when nature has poured her bounty over the adjoining regions in the south, and has little more left to bestow, she sends a few smart showers of rain to the desert, parched by the long prevalence of the perpendicular rays of the sun. The prevail ing winds blow during three months from the west, and nine months from the east. When the wind increases, into a storm, it frequently raises the loose sand in such quantities that a layer of nearly equal portions of sand and air, and ris ing about 20 feet above the surface of the ground, divides the purer atmosphere from the solid earth. This sand, when agitated by whirlwinds, sometimes overwhelms caravans with destruction, and, even when not fatal, involves them in the greatest confusion and danger. The natural products correspond with the physical fea tures of the country. Vegetation and animal life exist only sparingly in the oases or valleys where springs occur, and where the soil is not utterly unfit to nourish certain plants. Amongst the few trees the most important is the date-palm, which is peculiarly suited to the dryness of the climate. This useful tree flourishes best in the eastern part of the desert, inhabited by the Tibbus. The doum- palm is likewise a native of the same part, and seems entirely absent in the western Sahara; its northernmost limit is on the southern borders of Fezzan and Tegerry, in lat. 24 N. Acacias are found in the extreme west towards Senegambia, furnishing the so-called gum-arabic. In many parts of the desert a thorny evergreen plant occurs, about 18 inches high. It. is eagerly eaten by the camels, and is almost the only plant which supplies them with food w^hile thus traversing the desert. The cultivation of grains to a small extent is limited to the western oases of Tuat and others, a little barley, rice, and beans, being there grown. In the kingdom of Air there are some fields of maize and other grains ; but upon the whole, the population depend for these products on Soudan and other regions. There are but a few specimens of wild animals in these wildernesses ; lions and panthers are found only on its bor ders. Gazelles and antelopes are abundant, hares and foxes but scarce. Ostriches are very numerous, and vultures and ravens are also met with. In approaching Soudan, animal and vegetable life becomes more varied and abundant Of reptiles, only the smaller kinds are found, mostly harmless lizards and a few species of snakes. Of domestic animals, the most important is the camel, but horses and goats are not wanting, and in the country of the Tuaricks an excel lent breed of sheep is found, while in that of the Tibbus a large and fine variety of the ass is valuable to the inhabitants. Of minerals, salt is the chief production, which occurs chiefly near Bihna. The habitable portions of the Sahara are possessed by three different nations. In the extreme western portion are Moors and Arabs. They live in tents, which they re move from one place to another ; and their residences con sist of similar encampments, formed of from twenty to a hundred of such tents, where they are governed by a sheik of their own body; each encampment constituting, as it were, a particular tribe. They are a daring set of people, and not restrained by any scruple in plundering, ill-treating, and even killing persons who are not of their own faith ; but to such as are, they are hospitable and benevolent. The boldest of these children of the desert are the Tuaricks, who occupy the middle of the wilderness, where it is widest. The form of their bodies, and their language, prove that they belong to the aboriginal inhabitants of Northern Africa, who are known by the name of Berbers. They are a fine race of men, tall, straight, and handsome, with an air of independence which is very imposing. They live chiefly upon the tribute they exact from all caravans traversing their country. They render themselves formidable to all their neighbours, with whom they are nearly always in a state of enmity, making predatory incursions into the neighbouring countries. The third division of Saharan people are the Tibbus, who inhabit the eastern portion, comprising one of the best parts of the desert. In some of their features they resemble the Negroes. They are an agricultural and pastoral nation, live mostly in fixed abodes, and are in this respect greatly different from their western neighbours. Their country is as yet little explored by Europeans. The Tibbus are in part Pagans, while the other inhabitants of the Sahara are Mohammedans. The commerce of the Sahara consists chiefly of gold, ostrich feathers, slaves, ivory, iron, and salt, exchanged for manufactured goods, and transported across the desert by great caravans, which follow lines uniting the greater cities and oases of the southern and northern borders. Western Africa comprehends the west coast of Africa, Westers from the borders of the Sahara, in about lat. 17 N. to Africa. Nourse River, in about the same latitude south, with a con siderable space of inland territory, varying in its extent from the shores, and, in fact, completely undefined in its interior limits. Senegambia, the country of the Senegal and Gambia, Senegal extends from the Sahara in the north to lat. 10 in the kia. south, and may be considered as* extending inland to the sources of the waters which flow through it to the Atlantic. The western portion is very flat, and its contiguity to the great desert is frequently evidenced by dry hot winds, an atmosphere loaded with fine sand, and clouds of locusts. The eastern portion is occupied with hills and elevated land. Under the 10th parallel the hills approach quite close to the coast. The country possesses a great number of rivers, among which the Senegal, Gambia, and Rio Grande are the most important. Senegambia ranges, in point of heat, with the Sahara and Nubia. The atmosphere is most oppressive in the rainy season, which lasts from June to November, when an enormous amount of rain drenches the country. The prevailing winds in that period are south-west, whereas in the dry season they are from the east. The climate is, upon the whole, most unhealthy, and too gene rally proves fatal to Europeans. The vegetation is most luxuriant and vigorous. The baobab (monkey bread-tree), the most enormous tree on the face of the globe, is eminently characteristic of Senegambia. It attains to no great height, but the circumference of the trunk is frequently 60 to 75 feet, and has been found to measure 112 feet; its fruit, the monkey bread, is a princiSTATES.] AFRICA 269 pal article of food with the natives. Boinbaceie (cotton- trees) are likewise numerous, and they are among the loftiest in the world. Acacias, which furnish the gum-arabic, are most abundant, while the shores are lined with mangrove trees. The flora and fauna are similar to those of Nubia. Gold and iron are the chief metals. The inhabitants consist of various Negro nations, the chief of which are the Wolof. The gum trade is the most important traffic on the Sene gal ; bees-wax, ivory, bark, and hides, forming the chief exports from the Gambia. Of European settlements are : The French possessions on the Senegal ; the capital of which is St Louis, built about the year 1626, on an island at the mouth of the river. The total population of the settlement amounts to about 210,000. The British settlement on the Gambia has about 7000 inhabitants. Bathurst is the chief town. The Portuguese settlement consists of small factories south of the Gambia, at the Bissagos Islands, Bissao, Cacheo, and some other points. be Guinea The west coast of Africa, from Senegambia to the Nourse Dast. River, is commonly comprised by the general denomination Guinea Coast, a term of Portuguese origin. The coast is generally so very low, as to be visible to navi gators only within a very short distance, the trees being their only sailing marks. North of the equator, in the Bight of Benin, the coast forms an exception, being high and bold, with the Cameroon Mountains behind ; as also at Sierra Leone, which has received its name (Lion Moun tain) in consequence. The coast presents a dead level often for thirty to fifty miles inland. It has numerous rivers, some of which extend to the furthest recesses of Inner Africa. The climate, notoriously fatal to European life, is ren dered pestilential by the muddy creeks and inlets, the putrid swamps, and the mangrove jungles that cover the banks of the rivers. There are two seasons in the year, the rainy and the dry season. The former commences in the southern portion in March, but at Sierra Leone and other northern parts, a month later. Vegetation is exceedingly luxuriant and varied. One of the most important trees is the Elais guineensis, a species of palm, from the covering of whose seed or nut is ex tracted the palm-oil, so well known to English commerce and manufacture; several thousand tons are annually brought into the ports of Liverpool, London, and Bristol. The palm-oil tree is indigenous and abundant from the river Gambia to the Congo ; but the oil is manufactured in large quantities chiefly in the country of the Gold and Slave Coasts. The former comprises nearly all the more remark able of African animals : particularly abundant are elephants, hippopotami, monkeys, lions, leopards, crocodiles, serpents, parrots. The domestic animals are mostly of an inferior quality. The principal minerals are gold and iron. The population consists, besides a few European colonists, of a vast variety of Negro nations, similar in their physical qualities and prevailing customs, but differing considerably in their dispositions and morals. The chief articles of commerce are palm-oil, ivory, gold, wax, various kinds of timber, spices, gums, and rice. The divisions of Northern or Upper Guinea are mostly founded on the productions characteristic of the different parts, and are still popularly retained. i-rra The British colony of Sierra Leone extends from Rokelle river in the north, to Kater river in the south, and about twenty miles inland. The chief portion of the settlement is a rugged peninsula of mountains with a barren soil, but surrounded by a belt of rich coast-land, with a moist and pestilential climate. The colony was founded in 1787, and has been maintained with a view to the suppression of the West African slave trade. The population, consisting chiefly of liberated slaves, amounted, in 1869, to 55,374, of which number 129 were white men. Freetown, the capital is, after St Louis, the most considerable European town on the western coast of Africa. The Malaghetta or Grain Coast extends from Sierra Grain Leone to Cape Palmas. Malaghetta is a species of pepper Coast, yielded by a parasitical plant of this region. It is some times styled the Windy or Windward Coast, from the fre quency of short but furious tornadoes throughout the year. The republic of Liberia, a settlement of the American Liberia Colonisation Society, founded in 1822, for the purpose of removing free people of colour from the United States, occupies a considerable extent of the coast, and has for its capital Monrovia, a town named after the president, Mr Monro. The Ivory Coast extends from Cape Palmas 3 W. long., Ivory and obtained its name from the quantity of the article Coast, supplied by its numerous elephants. The French settle ments of Grand Bassam, Assinie, and Dabou were aban doned in 1871. The Gold Coast stretches from west of Cape Three Points Gold to the river Volta, and has long been frequented for gold- Coast, dust and other products. By a treaty of February 1871, the whole of the Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast were made over to Britain, and the Danish settlements of Chris- tiansburg and Friedensburg were ceded to the English in 1849; so that the British coast now extends from the mouth of the Teuda river, in long 2 40 W., to that of the Ewe, in long. 1 10 E. of Greenwich. The protected territory extends inland from this coast strip to an average distance of 50 miles. Cape Coast Castle and Fort James, founded by the British, and Elmina (population about 10,000) the most important of the former Dutch stations, with Accra, are the chief settlements. The Slave Coast e tends from the river Yolta to the Slave Calabar river, and is, as its name implies, the chief scene Coast, of the most disgraceful traffic that blots the history of man kind. Eko or Lagos, one of the chief towns of the coast, was destroyed by the British in 1852, and was proclaimed a British possession in 1861. Palma and Badagry are also British settlements. The kingdoms of Ashantee, Dahomey, Ycruba, and others, occupy the interior country of the Guinea coast. Ashantee the most powerful Negro state of Upper Guinea, is a;. exceedingly fertile and productive country. Its inhabitants, though skilled in some manufactures and of a higher intel ligence than is usually found in this region, are of an exceedingly sanguinary disposition, and have frequently been involved in war with the British. The capital city, Kumassi, is believed to have a population of about 100,000. The coast from the Old Calabar river to the Portuguese possessions is inhabited by various tribes. Duke Town, on the former river, is a town of 4000 inhabitants, with considerable trade in palm-oil, ivory, and timber. On the Gaboon river, close to the equator, are a French settlement (in 1871 the French retained only a coaling station), and American missionary stations. At the equa tor Southern or Lower Guinea begins, where the only European settlements are those of the Portuguese. Loango is reckoned from the equator to the Zaire or Loango. Congo river. Its chief town is Boally, called Loango by the Europeans. Congo extends south of the Zaire, comprising a very Congo, fertile region, with veins of copper and iron. Banza Congo or St Salvador is the capital. Angola comprises the districts of Angola proper, Ben- Angola ; guela, and Mossamedes. In these regions the Portuguese Henguel: settlements extend farther inland than the two preceding districts, namely, about 200 miles. The capital, St Paulo de Loando, contains 12,300 inhabitants, and has a fine harbour. St Felipe de Benguela is situated in a picturesque but very marshy and most unhealthy spot.

The coast from Benguela to the Cape Colony may, in a general arrangement like this, be included either within West Africa or South Africa. The whole coast is little visited or known, being of a most barren and desolate description, and possessing few harbours. Ichabo island and Angra Peguena Bay are visited for their guano deposits, and are claimed as British possessions.

Under South Africa the Cape Colony only is generally comprised. It takes its name from the Cape of Good Hope, and extends from thence to the Orange river in the north, and to the Kai river in the east. A large proportion of the territory included within these limits, especially in the north, is either unoccupied, or, excepting missionary stations, entirely in the hands of the aborigines.

Apart from the shores, the country consists of high lands, forming parallel mountainous ridges, with elevated plains or terraces of varying extent between. The loftiest range, styled in different parts of its course Sneuw-bergen, Winter-bergen, Nieuveld-bergen, and Roggenveld-bergen, names originated by the Dutch, is the third and last encountered on proceeding into the interior from the south coast. This and the other chains are deeply cut by the transverse valleys called kloofs, which serve as passes across them, and appear as if produced by some sudden convulsion of nature, subsequently widened by the action of the atmosphere and running water.

The high plains or terraces are remarkable for their extraordinary change of aspect in the succession of the seasons. During the summer heats they are perfect deserts, answering to the term applied to them, karroos, signifying, in the Hottentot language, "dry" or "arid." But the sandy soil being pervaded with the roots and fibres of various plants, is spontaneously clothed with the richest verdure after the rains, and becomes transformed for a time into a vast garden of gorgeous flowers, yielding the most fragrant odours. Adapted thus to the support of graminivorous animals, the karroos are the resort of antelopes, zebras, quaggas, and gnus in countless herds, and of the carnivorous beasts that prey upon them, the lion, hyaena, leopard, and panther. These quadrupeds, however, with the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe, buffalo, and ostrich, have been largely banished from their old haunts by the advancing footsteps of civilised man, and are only found in the more secluded parts of the interior. The country has a singular and superb flora, but it comprises few native plants useful to man: many such have been now introduced. Heaths of varied species and great beauty abound; and geraniums are treated as common weeds. Many highly productive districts occur; corn, wines, and fruit being the chief objects of cultivation in the neighbour hood of the Cape, while the more inland settlements are grazing farms. Some fine natural forests clothe the sides of the mountains; but in general the colony is deficient in timber trees, as well as in navigable streams, perennial springs, and regular rain. A great deposit of rich copper ore occurs near the mouth of the Orange; and salt is obtained for consumption and sale from salt lakes.

The climate is exceedingly fine and salubrious. There are two seasons, characterised by the prevalence of certain winds. During the summer, which lasts from September to April, the winds blow from south-east, cold and dry; during the winter, namely from May to September, north-west winds prevail. In the most elevated regions the winters are occasionally severe, and snow and ice occur.

The chief native tribes within the British territory are the Hottentots, Bechuanas, and Kaffres. No manufacture is conducted at the Cape except the making of wine, of which from 10,000 to 40,000 gallons are annually exported to England. Various articles of provision are supplied to ships sailing between Europe and the East Indies.

Cape Town is the capital of the colony, and contains 28,460 inhabitants, of whom 15,120 are Europeans. Its commerce is considerable, and the port is frequented by 500 to 600 vessels every year.

The Orange river sovereignty, added to the British territories in 1848, but subsequently given up and constituted a free republic, extends north of the Orange river as far as the Ky Gariep or Vaal river. In consequence of the discovery of rich diamond fields on the lower Vaal river and in the neighbouring territory of the Griqua chief Waterboer, who also petitioned to have his lands subjected to British rule, a wide country surrounding the diamond-fields was incorporated with the Cape Colony in October 1871, under the name of Griqua Land West, divided into the districts of Pneil, Griqua Town, and Klipdrift. The population of this new territory was estimated at 50,000 in 1872, concentrated in camps round the chief diamond-fields. In 1869, Bassuto Land, a mountainous territory at the head waters of the Nu Gariep branch of the Orange river, and on the inward slope of the Drakenberg range, was incorporated as a British possession.

Natal or Victoria, a district on the east coast, and separated from the Cape Colony by Kaffraria, is a recently formed British settlement, which was created into a colony in 1856. It is highly favoured in those respects in which the Cape is most deficient, having abundance of wood and water, with coal and various metallic ores, a fine alluvial soil, and a climate adapted to the cultivation of the products for which the home demand is large and constant—cotton, silk, and indigo. Pietermaritzburg, the capital of the settlement, lies 50 miles from the coast. Port Natal, now D'Urban, seated on a fine lake-like bay, is the only harbour.

The Transvaal Republic is an inland state, between the Vaal on the south and the Limpopo river on the north, having the Drakenberg edge on the east, and the Bechuana tribes, which occupy the region bordering on the Kalahira desert, on the west, founded by the Dutch boers emigrating from the Cape Colony. Its surface is an elevated plateau, thinly wooded in some parts, but generally affording excel lent pasture. The chief town is Potchefstroom, on a tributary of the Vaal; but the seat of government is at Pretoria, in the region of the head streams of the Limpopo.

East Africa extends from Natal northwards to the Red Sea, comprising Sofala, Mozambique, Zanzibar, and the Somali country. But little is known of that region beyond the shores. The Sofala Coast, extending from Delagoa Bay to the Zambeze river, is flat, sandy, and marshy, gradually ascending towards the interior. It abounds with rivers, which are the source of yearly inundations. The soil is very fertile, and produces chiefly rice. In the interior, gold and other metals, as well as precious stones, are found. The Portuguese have settlements at Sofala, in an unhealthy spot, abounding with salt marshes; it consists of only huts, a church, and a fort in ruins. Inhambane, near the tropic of Capricorn, has an excellent harbour.

Mozambique extends from the Zambeze to Cape Delgado, and is similar, in its natural features, to the Sofala Coast. The greatest river is the Zambeze. The principal settlement of the Portuguese is at Quillimane, which is situated in a very unhealthy position on the northern arm of the delta of the Zambeze, surrounded with mangrove trees.

The Zanzibar or Sawahili Coast extends from Cape Delgado to the river Jub, near the equator. The coast is generally low, and has but few bays or harbours: its northern portion is rendered dangerous by a line of coral reefs extending along it. The region possesses a great number of rivers, but none of them attain a first-rate magnitude. The principal are the Rovuma, the Lufiji, Ruvu, Pangani, and Dana; the two latter rising in the snowy mountains of Kilima-njaro and Kenia. The climate is similar to that of other tropical coasts of Africa, hot and unhealthy in general: in some portions, however, the elevated ground, and with it a more temperate and healthy climate, approaches the shores to within a short distance. The vegetation is luxuriant, and cocoa-nut, palms, maize, rice, and olives are the chief articles of cultivation. The fauna comprises all the more characteristic African species.

The chief inhabitants are the Sawahili, of mixed Arab and Negro descent, but the coasts are under the Arab dominion of the Imaum of Muscat, by whose efforts commerce with the nations of the interior has greatly increased.

The island of Zanzibar (Unguja of the Sawahili) is the residence of a Sultan, tributary to the Imaum of Muscat, and the seat of extensive commerce. Mombas, on a small island close to the main shore, possesses the finest harbour on that coast, and has recently become famous as the seat of an important missionary station.

The Somali country comprises the eastern horn of Africa, from the equator northward to the Bay of Tadjurra, near the entrance into the Red Sea. The coast is generally bold and rocky, in some places covered with sand; and the extensive region it encloses presents a slightly ascending plain, traversed by large valleys of great fertility, among which the Wady Nogal is prominent. This country is not so well watered as the region to the south, and some of its rivers are periodical.

The Somali country is famous for its aromatic productions and gums of various kinds; and it is supposed that the spices and incense consumed in such large quantities by the ancient peoples of Egypt, Greece, Syria, and Rome, were derived from this part of Africa, and not from Arabia.

Zeïla and Berbera, on the northern coast, are the chief trading ports: the permanent population of the former is about 3000, while the latter may be said to exist only during the winter, when no less than 20,000 strangers, at an average, arrive to pitch their tents, and thus create a great market-place. Harrar, in the Galla coimtry, is the chief place in the interior, with 8000 inhabitants, who are Mohammedans. One-third of the population is Somali, one-third Arab.

Central Africa comprises the regions which extend from the southern borders of the Sahara in the north to Cape Colony in the south, and from Senegambia in the west to the territory of the Egyptian pashalic on the east. It comprehends the central basins of the great lakes from Lake Chad to the Nyassa, and the greater part of the basins of the Niger, Congo, Nile, and Zambeze. Even the Sahara may well be included in this general denomination. So little is yet known of this vast region that the general features of some portions only can be indicated. The greater portion seems to be densely peopled with numerous tribes, and to possess inexhaustible natural resources. The portion north of the equator, under the name Soudan or Nigritia, comprises a great number of states, among which the principal are Bambarra, Timbuktu, and Houssa, in the west; Bornu, Baghermi, and Waday, around Lake Chad; Darfur in the east; and Adamaua in the south. The inhabitants are of Negro race, with many Arabs, Moors, and Berbers.

Bambarra occupies part of the basin of the Joliba, or upper source of the Quorra. The dominant inhabitants are the Mandingoes and Foulahs, who have embraced Islamism, and are much more advanced in civilisation than the other Negro tribes. The country comprises extensive and excellent pastures, with abundance of domestic animals, as horned cattle, sheep, goats, and horses of a fine breed. Among the vegetable products the most remarkable is the butter-tree, which furnishes an important article of agricultural industry and trade.

Sego, the capital, is situated on the Joliba, and contains 30,000 inhabitants. It was here that Mungo Park first caught sight of the long-sought river.

Timbuktu, or Jennie, comprises the basin of the Joliba below Bambarra, and lies partly within the Great Sahara. Timbuktu, a few miles from the banks of the Joliba, and situated amid sands and deserts, is a celebrated centre of the North African caravan trade. It contains from 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants.

Houssa is an extensive country extending to the Sahara in the north, to the Joliba or Kawara on the west, to Bornu on the east, and to about 10° N. lat. on the south. The dominant race are the Foulahs, but the mass of the population are Negroes. It is a very fertile and beautiful country, but the climate is insalubrious, and in many parts fatal to Europeans. The inhabitants are engaged in pastoral, as well as in agricultural and commercial pursuits.

The capital, Sakatu, is one of the largest cities in Negroland; it is situated in a fertile but marshy plain. Kano, another large town, containing 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, is the great emporium of trade in Houssa; there the English merchandise coming from the north through the Sahara, meets with American goods coming from the Bight of Benin. The manufactures of Kano consist chiefly of cloth, for the dyeing of which that town is famed all over Central Africa.

Bornu is one of the most powerful states of Negroland; extending on the west to the 10th degree of long., on the east to Lake Chad and the kingdom of Baghermi, and on the south as far as Mandara and Adamaua, in about 11° N. lat. Kanem, on the northern side of Lake Chad, has recently been conquered and brought under Bornuese sovereignty.

The general character of Bornu is that of a plain, subject to inundations, particularly near Lake Chad. It is very fertile, and cotton and indigo attain a high degree of excellence. The original Boruuese are an agricultural people.

Kuka, the capital and residence of the Sheik of Bornu, had in 1866 about 60,000 inhabitants.

Baghermi, another powerful kingdom, is situated east of Bornu. The boundaries, according to Dr Barth, who first visited this country and penetrated as far as Maseña, the capital, are on the west the river Loggeme, a tributary of the Shary or Asu, by which it is divided from Bornu and Adamaua; on the north its limits are in about 12½° N. lat., and on the east 19½° E. long., both lines dividing it from Waday; the southern boundary is in about 8½° N. lat. Baghermi is an extensive plain or valley formed by the river Shary or Asu and its tributaries. The inhabitants are very warlike, and frequently engage in slave marauding expeditions into the neighbouring states to the south.

Maseña, the capital, lies in 11° 40' N. lat., and 17° 20' E. long.

Waday, or Dar Saley, lies east of Baghermi, and reaches as far as Darfur. It comprises an extensive region, stretching as far as the basin of the Nile. Lake Fittri, situated in the western portion, forms a basin, unconnected with that of Lake Chad, and by which the country as far as Darfur is drained. It has never been explored by Europeans. The population comprises a great variety of tribes and different languages.

Wara, the capital, is placed by Dr Barth in 14° N. lat., and 22° E. long.

Darfur, east of Waday, extends as far as Kordofan. The Darfur country rises towards the west into a range of hills called Jebel Marrah. It is drained into the Nile. A great portion of the country is Saharan in its character, while other parts are fertile and diversified. Browne, in 1703, estimated the whole population at 200,000. It has an extensive trade with Egypt.

272 AFRICA Cobbeih, the capital, is a merchant town, and contains about 6000 inhabitants. damaua. Fumbina or Adamaua is an extensive country south of Houssa and Bornu, under Foulah dominion. It consists of a large, fertile, and highly-cultivated valley, formed by the River Benue. Near Yola, the capital, the Benue receives the Faro, a large tributary coming from the south-west. This country was first visited by Dr Barth in 1851. Yola, the capital, lies in 8 50 N. lat, and 13 30 E. longitude. South of the belt of Negro states of the Soudan lies the great unknown region of Central Africa. On the east the unexplored area is bounded by the numerous states of the lake region made known by Burton, Speke, and Livingstone. Of these the chief are Unyamwesi, occupying the plateau south of the Victoria Lake, and east of Lake Tanganyika, with the capital town of Kaseh or Tabora, frequented by Arab traders from Zanzibar; Karague on the western side of the Victoria Nyanza; and Uganda, stretching round its north-western shores. In the interior, beyond Lake Tanganyika, Livingstone has recently made known the peoples of Manyuema laud, where " there is no political cohesion ; not one king or kingdom. Each man is independent of every other." To the south of the unknown region are the powerful Negro kingdoms of the Muata Yanvo and of the Cazembe, occupying the whole of the interior between 6 and 1 2 S. lat. Kabebe, the capital of the former state, is believed to be in about lat. 8$., long. 23 30 E. of Greenwich; and Lunda, the chief town of the latter potentate, is in the Luapula valley, south-west of the Tanganyika Lake, and was visited by Livingstone in 1867-68. The Makololo kingdom, occupying the central basin of the Zambeze river, with the chief town of Linyanti, west of the Victoria Falls ; and that of Mosilikatse in the south-east, between the Zambeze and the Limpopo rivers, are the great remaining divisions of Central Africa. Besides these, however, innumerable petty kingdoms, chiefships, and tribes subdivide the vast populations of Negroland. ands. To Africa belong a considerable number of islands. The Madeiras, belonging to Portugal, lie off the north-west coast of Africa, at a -distance of about 360 miles. Madeira, the chief island, is about 100 miles in circuit, and has long been famed for its picturesque beauty, rich fruits, and fine climate, which, renders it a favourite resort of invalids. Wine is the staple produce. Funchal, the chief town, with 18,000 inhabitants, is a regular station for the West India mail steam-packets from Southampton, and the Brazilian sailing-packets from Falmouth. The Canaries, belonging to Spain, the supposed Fortunate Islands of the ancients, are situated about 300 miles south of Madeira. They are 1 3 in number, all of volcanic origin, Teneriffe being the largest. The latter is remarkable for its peak, which rises as a vast pyramidal mass to the height of 12,173 feet. The Cape Verde Islands, subject to Portugal, are a numerous group about 80 miles from Cape Verde. They obtained their name from the profusion of sea-weed found by the discoverers in the neighbouring ocean, giving it the appearance of a green meadow. They are also of volcanic origin. Fernando Po, a very mountainous forest- covered island, is in the Bight of Biafra. The British settlement of Clarence Town was established in 1827, but afterwards abandoned. The island now belongs to Spain. St Thomas, immediately under the equator, is a Portu guese settlement; as is also Prince s Island, in 2 N. lat. Annobon in 2 S. lat., belongs to the Spaniards. Ascension, a small, arid, volcanic islet, was made a British port on the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte at St Helena, and since retained as a station, at which ships may touch for stores. Green Hill, the summit of the island, rises to the height of 2840 feet. St Helena is a huge dark mass of rock, rising abruptly from the ocean to the height of 2692 feet. James Town is the only town and port. Madagascar, the largest island of Africa, and one of the Mada- largest in the world, is separated from the Mozambique gascar. coast by a channel of that name, about 250 miles wide. The area exceeds that of France. The high interior of the island is generally very fertile, with magnificent forests and fine pastures watered by numerous rivers, but a belt of hot^ swamp land with a deadly climate surrounds the coast. The inhabitants are diverse races of Negro, Arab, and Malay origin. The Ovahs, a people of the central provinces, are now dominant. The principal town, Antananarivo, has about 80,000 inhabitants. The French possess the islands of Saute Marie and Nos- sibe on the coast of Madagascar, and Mayotta island in the Comoro group. The Comoro isles, four in number, are in the north part of the Mozambique Channel, and inhabited by Arab tribes. Reunion or Bourbon, 400 miles east of Madagascar, is a colony of France, producing for export, coffee, sugar, cocoa, spices, and timber. Mauritius, ceded to the British by the French in 1814, is 90 miles north-east of Bourbon. The sugar-cane is chiefly cultivated. Port Louis, the capital, beautifully situated, has 75,000 inhabitants. Within the jurisdiction of the Governor of the Mauritius are the islands of Rodri guez, the Seychelles, and the Amarante islands. Socotra, a large island, east of Cape Jerdaffun, with an Arab and Negro population, has been known from early times; it belongs to the Imaum of Muscat. This island was long celebrated as producing the finest aloetic drug ; it is found still to produce a fine kind of aloe, though much of what passed as Socotrine aloes really came from India. Gums, tobacco, and dates are also exported. (K. j.) Note. The above article was completed before it was known with certainty that the saddest event in the history of African exploration had occurred. Dr Livingstone, to whom the article justly assigns " the first place among African discoverers," died of dysentery near Lake Bang- weolo on the 4th of May 1873. The story of his latest discoveries, and of the rare devotion with which his native attendants carried his remains with them during an eight months march to the coast, belongs to a biographical notice. It is more fitting in this place to note, as some consolation for an almost irreparable loss, that Living stone s death seems to have given a powerful stimulus to the prosecution of the task he had so nearly completed. The expedition of Lieutenant Cameron, above referred to. is being carried out with a vigour and intelligence that give ample promise of a further limitation of the region of the unknown, if not of the complete solution of all out- standingproblems. In the springof 1 874 he had commenced a thorough exploration of Lake Tanganyika, which, from his professional experience as a hydrographical surveyor, is expected to lead to very valuable results. And the complete success of Stanley s first memorable mission in search of Livingstone warrants confident hopes in regard to a second expedition, also admirably organised and equipped, which has started under his direction.

1. See Flora of Tropical Africa, by Daniel Oliver, F.R.S., F.L.S., London, 1868.
2. The Geographical Distribution of Mammals, by Andrew Murray, London, 1866.