Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/391

ing the medal, says, 'Whilst I undertook the history, ethnography, the languages and peculiarities of the people, to Captain Speke fell the arduous task of delineating the exact topography and of laying down our positions by astronomical observations, a labour to which at times even the undaunted Livingstone found himself unequal' (Journal R. G. S., vol. xxix., p. 97).

"I beg you also to read your husband's masterly and eloquent description of the lake regions of Central Equatorial Africa in the same volume. No memoir in our journal is more striking than this, and I think it will gratify you to have Captain Burton's most effective writing brought once more to the notice of geographers. I will with great pleasure add a full footnote to the paragraph in which I first allude to the Tanganyika, and point out how admirably Captain Burton has illustrated that portion of Lake Tanganyika which he and his companion visited; though, as you know, he was then prostrated by illness and almost blind.

"With this explanation, which will appear in all the official and public copies of my little, imperfect, opening address, I hope you will be satisfied, and exonerate me from any thought of not doing full justice to your meritorious husband, who, if he had been in health, would doubtless have worked out the path which Livingstone is still engaged in discovering: the settlement of whether the waters of Tanganyika flow into the said discovered Albert Nyanza by Baker.

"Believe me to be ever, dear Mrs. Burton,

"Yours sincerely,

"Roderick Murchison."