Nigritia, it appears that we are only beginning to obtain a correct description. Various officers of the French army at present engaged in the arduous enterprise of establishing the colony of Algeria, have occupied themselves in collecting information regarding the numerous tribes overspreading Northern Africa; and it would seem, from their accounts, that the ideas we have been accustomed to entertain concerning these regions are far from correct.
According to the recent accounts, Northern Africa, between the Mediterranean and Nigritia, consists of two portions—the Tell, or that strip of land varying from 50 to 120 miles in breadth, which lies along the sea; and the Sahara, or, as it has commonly been called, the Great Desert. The following remarks respecting the Tell are from the work of Mr. Hodgson previously quoted:—'On the Mediterranean coast of Africa, there are in progress at this moment great political and commercial revolutions. There exists in that region a sanguinary and unceasing conflict of Christianity with Mohammedanism, of civilization with semi-barbarism. France having conquered the extensive territory of Algeria, is now pushing forward her victorious legions into the more important and more populous empire of Morocco. The result of a conflict between undisciplined hordes and the science of European warfare cannot be doubtful. But there are elements in this contest which perhaps have not been well understood. It is not with the Arab populations of those countries with which France has chiefly to contend. That, indeed, is the more intellectual but smaller portion of the people of Algeria and Morocco. The more ferocious and larger portion of that population consists of the aboriginal Berbers, the ancient Numidians, and Mauritanians. The Romans term this race genus insuperabile bello—"unconquerable in war." It remains to be determined if they have lost that proud appellation.'
'To form a correct conception of the Sahara,' says a writer in the Edinburgh Review (No. 169), condensing the information contained in some of the recent French publications on the subject, 'our readers must dismiss from their minds all loose and fantastic conceptions which have been attached, from time immemorial, to the interior of Northern Africa. Instead of a torrid region, where boundless steppes of burning sand are abandoned to the roving horsemen of the Desert, and to beasts of prey, and where the last vestiges of Moorish civilization expire long before the traveler arrives at Negroland and the savage communities of the interior, the Sahara is now ascertained to consist of a vast archipelago of oases; each of them peopled by a tribe of the Moorish race or its offsets, more civilized, and more capable of receiving the lessons of civilization, than the houseless Arabs of the Tell (the mountainous tract lying between the Great Desert and the sea); cultivating the date-tree with application and ingenuity, inhabiting walled towns, living under a regular government, for the most part of a popular origin; carrying to some perfection certain branches of native manufactures, and keeping up an extensive system of commercial intercourse with the northern and central parts of the African continent, and from Mogador to Mecca, by the enterprise and activity of their caravans. Each of the oases of the Sahara, which are divided from one another by sandy tracts, bearing shrubs and plants fit only for the nourishment of cattle, presents an animated group of towns and villages. Every village is encircled by a profusion of fruit-bearing trees. The
