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opinions entertained by the medievals and the moderns upon the actual point-now said to have been long ago determined. In the fourth century of the Christian era, the Axumites and the Egyptian Greeks knew the Astaboras, Atbara, Bahr-al-Aswad, or Black River, as the Nile. That river was the Nile of the Arabian geographer Al Mazin or Elmazin, as well as of Cantacuzene and Albuquerque, and it continued to be known as such until the end of the eleventh century. When, however, the country between the Black River and the Blue River came to be occupied by the Muhammadans, the latter was then regarded as the upper course of the Nile. It was so described by De Barros, a Portuguese writer in the early portion of the sixteenth century, and that the Abai (the upper course of the Blue River) was the Nile, met with almost a general acceptation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The error has even been handed down to our own times, and advocated by various geographers, among others by Murray, the editor of Bruce, who asserted that all the inhabitants of the valley of the Blue River, from Fah-Zokl to its junction with the White Nile, know the river of Habesh or of Abyssinia by the name of Bahr-el-Azrek, or Blue River; and as the latter river is regarded as the Nile in preference to the larger stream with which it unites, so must the Abai, as the upper course of the Bahr-elAzrek, be regarded as the Nile. Mr. Cooley has contended for the same identification still more recently in his "Inner Africa Laid Open." Thus it was that in the lapse of ages the Black River and the Blue River, each in its turn, came to be regarded as the upper course of the Nile of Egypt; the Takkazye by the Axumites, in common with the early Christians of Egypt; the Abai by the Amharans, jointly with the Portuguese Jesuits.

D'Anville appears to have been one of the first among moderns to identify the White Nile with the Nile of Ptolemy, but its course above the junction with the Blue River was first explored by M. Linant in 1827, and that traveller ascended the stream as far as Al Ais, in 13 deg. 43 min. north latitude. This was followed by the well-known expeditions sent up the same river by Muhammad Ali, the second of which reached 3 deg. 42 min. north latitude, discovering on its way the Sobat, Lake No, and the Bahr-el-Ghazal. Unfortunately, this discovery of the Sobat led to much erroneous speculation. M. Antoine d'Abbadie, considering the Go-jub, or God-jeb, or the Uma, of Inarya and Kaffa to be head-waters of the Sobat, proclaimed the discovery of the sources of the Nile in 7 deg. 25 min. north latitude, and in 34 deg. 18 min. 6 sec. east longitude of Paris. He described its source as a small spring issuing from the foot of a large tree, and as being held sacred by the natives, who yearly offer up at it a solemn sacrifice. To the right and left of the source were two high hills, wooded to the summit, and called Boshi and Doshi, representing, it was supposed, the Crophi and Mophi of Herodotus. Subsequently, M. d'Abbadie placed the sources at Mount Bora, in Inarya, in 7 deg. 50 min. 8 sec. north latitude, and 34 deg. 39 min. 5 sec. east longitude of Paris. Finally, it was announced in "Cosmos" for November 16, 1860, that M. d'Abbadie "had planted the tricolor flag of France on the Bora Rock, situated in a forest on the confines of the country of Inarya, and at the summit of which is found the mysterious source of the river Uma, which is considered to be the principal tributary

of the White River, or true Nile. This rock (Bora), which projects as a promontory towards the north, rises 8830 feet above the sea level: it is in latitude 7 deg. 51 min. north, and 34 deg. 39 min. east longitude of Paris."

Dr. Beke claims having sent home from Shoa, in 1841, information collected there by Dr. Krapf and himself respecting the river Go-jub, which they both correctly believed to flow southward, and to discharge its waters into the Indian Ocean. Major Harris also adopted the same view; but Dr. Beke subsequently changed his opinion, and advocated in opposition to Krapf, Harris, Macqueen, Humboldt, Ritter, Zimmermann, Keith Johnson, and most geographers, that the God-jeb, as he spells it, was one of the head-streams of the Sobat, and he adds, in his work on the "Sources of the Nile," p. 127, "After the publication, in 1847, of my paper 'On the Nile and its Tributaries,' in which it is demonstrated that the God-jeb can only be one of the head-streams of the Sobat, there were few persons competent to form a judgment on the subject who did not concur in that opinion."

That the said opinion was, however, erroneous has been completely settled by the testimony since published by the French missionaries resident in Kaffa, who describe the Uma and Go-jub as flowing into the Indian Ocean, and being navigated to within a short distance of the metropolis of Kaffa by Arab boats; as also by the exploration of the Sobat by M. Debono, and in a recent paper published in the New Monthly Magazine, No. 506, February, 1863, we have shown, upon the authority of Brun-Rollet (Bull. de la Soc. de Geo., t. iv. p. 410, 1852), of M. Trémaux (Bull., t. iii. p. 146, 1862), and of the French missionaries, that the Himadu, or "Snow Mountains," written "Imadon" by the above authorities, constitute the lofty dividing ridge between the tributaries to the White Nile and the waters flowing by the Uma, Go-jub or Gub, to the Indian Ocean. These Snow Mountains constitute a portion of the Eastern African mountains, and yet they are not Dr. Beke's "Mountains of the Moon," which in the same parallel he places far away to the east, on an imaginary littoral prolongation.

Dr. Beke, however, having identified the southern portion of the Eastern African mountains, including the snow mountains Kenia and Kilimanjaro, and others discovered by Krapf and Rebmann, and their imaginary north-easterly prolongation with Ptolemy's "Mountains of the Moon," he claims to have first enunciated the hypothesis that the Nile had its sources in these mountains. This is in 1847. The doctor further developed his views at Swansea in 1848, at Ipswich in 1851, and in the Edin. Phil. Journ. for Oct., 1861, as also in other papers and memoirs, and that in face of the testimony quoted by himself, as also by Mr. Cooley, from Fernandez de Enciso, a Portuguese writer in the sixteenth century, and who in his "Suma de Geographia" (1530), fol. 54, says: "West of this port (Mombas) stands the Mount Olympus of Ethiopia, which is exceedingly high (evidently Kilimanjaro); and beyond it are the Mountains of the Moon, in which are the sources of the Nile." That is to say, that Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon, viewed from Mombas, were beyond, or to the west of, Mount Olympus or Kilimanjaro, as now corroborated by Speke and Grant's researches. The doctor at the same time identified the Sobat and Tubiri with Ptolemy's two arms of the Nile,

and in his work on the sources of that river, published in 1860, he adds: "With our present increased knowledge, and subject to the modifications caused thereby, I am inclined to retain my opinion of former years"-i.e. that the God-jeb flows into the Sobat, with a great spiral (a repetition of that of God-jam), and the Sobat is one of the head-sources of the Nile; nor do we see anything in the same writer's pamphlet of 1861 to militate against this view of the subject. Among the modifications caused by increased knowledge, we must, we suppose, notice lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, identified at p. 134 with Ptolemy's eastern and western lakes. "For at the point at which, nearly eighteen hundred years previously, the exploration of the Nile had been abandoned by Nero's centurions, it was resumed by those of Muhammad Ali, who penetrated so far to the south as to establish the almost literal accuracy of the description of the Upper Nile given by the great geographer of Alexandria; which has now been corroborated by the discovery of the lakes Nyanza and Tanganyika, whence Ptolemy derived his two arms of the Nile." (How much more is that literal accuracy established by the discovery of the Little and Great Luta Nzigé lakes?) And at page 139 he says: "From what has preceded, it is manifest that Ptolemy was fully warranted in making the two newlydiscovered lakes to be the heads of his two arms of the Nile; Nyanza being so in fact, and Tanganyika, if not in fact, at least according to native African notions and phraseology."

It is but doing justice to Dr. Beke to say that he, at the same time, expresses doubts as to the waters of Lake Tanganyika flowing into the Nile (p. 135); he admits that other westerly lakes may yet be discovered (p. 135 and p. 143), and he also expresses his doubts if Lake Victoria empties its waters into the Nile by the Tubiri, but rather, he deems, by the basins of the Sobat or Shol (p. 141).

Yet, in the face of these complicated deductions, often at variance with one another (for if Lake Tanganyika or another (then) undiscovered lake were Ptolemy's western lake and branch of the Nile, and Lake Victoria the eastern, the Sobat could not be the easterly source, unless as the head-waters of the Tubiri, which Dr. Beke does not distinctly announce), proceeding upon the assumption of his having first announced, in 1848, that the sources of the Nile had their origin in the southern portion of the Eastern African mountains (Dr. Beke's "Mountains of the Moon"), the doctor has, since the return of Captains Speke and Grant, published a pamphlet, being copies of letters to Sir R. I. Murchison and to Lord Ashburton, under the title, "Who Discovered the Sources of the Nile ?" and in which he puts in his claim to that high distinction on purely theoretical grounds.

Such a claim cannot, however, be admitted. The information recently acquired by explorations on the White Nile, as also by Krapf and Rebmaun, and by Burton and Speke, in Eastern Africa, had reduced the question to so narrow a compass that no practical geographer but could have placed his finger on a map upon what must be the proximate sources of the Nile. But to claim the discovery of those sources upon a series of conflicting opinions and ideas now almost entirely set aside, is not occupying a tenable position, however exalted it may be for the time being. If America had been discovered while Columbus was soliciting aid in vain from Genoa, Portugal, and England, could the Genoese navigator have

claimed the discovery of the New World upon theoretical grounds? The very story of the broken egg is illustrative of the fallacy of such a claim. Yet such is the position of Dr. Beke; while his emissary, Dr. Bialloblotzky, failed to carry out the journey from Zanzibar to the White Nile, in 1848, Speke, after discovering Lake Victoria, reached the White Nile from Zanzibar, discovering on his way the Kitangulé, Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon, and a westerly lake, and with him and his companion in toil remain all the honour of successful discovery.

It is, in fact, the imperfect credence given by antiquity to Ptolemy's views, and the extraordinary diversity of opinions entertained in the middle ages, in modern times, and by the most recent travellers, regarding the sources of the Nile, that establishes more than anything else the magnitude and importance of Captain Speke's discoveries. The wellknown and able German geographer, Petermann, remarked upon the first discovery of Lake Victoria: "In spite of the glorious discoveries of Captain Speke, we have not yet reached the grand centre of all the geographical researches of Equatorial Africa-the decision regarding the site of the sources of the Nile; for it is not yet ascertained whether the Nile really has its rise from the lake discovered by Captain Speke. We readily believe that Captain Speke's view is founded on various and careful researches, but the ultimate solution of the question can only be expected by further researches made on the spot. This shows that the solution of the old problem of the Nile's sources will yet require a good deal of labour; but in consequence of the travels and researches made by Captain Speke and the Protestant missionaries in the south, and by the Egyptians and the Roman Catholic missionaries, the region yet unsurveyed, and in which the sources of the Nile must be situated, is so much circumscribed, that probably a single journey of a scientific traveller, proceeding from Zanzibar to Gondokoro, or vice versâ, would suffice to solve definitively this famous geographical problem; and that such a journey will soon be accomplished is evidenced by the projects of Dr. Roscher, Frith's, and especially by the Anglo-Indian expedition under Lieutenant J. D. Kenelly, at the recommendation of Lord Elphinstone, and which will proceed towards the scene of Major Burton and Captain Speke's discoveries, in order to circumnavigate and survey the whole of Lake Victoria."

Whilst these proposed expeditions were in abeyance, or abortive, Captains Speke and Grant have carried out the very projects here proposed. It is true they have not explored the easterly side of the lake, that they have not determined what affluents, or whether any affluents join the lake from Mount Kenia and the neighbouring mountains, and that they have not solved the puzzle of Lake Baringu, but they have discovered Ptolemy's "Mountains of the Moon;" they have discovered the affluent from those mountains, and, to all appearance, the Alexandrian geographer's easterly and westerly lakes, and they have shown that both contribute their waters to the Upper Nile. Can any theoretical surmises be for a moment placed upon a par with such practical discoveries? And what will the world think of the good taste that steps in to despoil two gallant, enterprising, and enduring explorers-two wayworn, sick, and weary champions of research, of their hard-won honours, at the very moment when they are welcomed home by the open arms of their sympathising countrymen?

Captains Speke and Grant, starting from Zanzibar, first reached Kazeh, in Unyamwezi," the Land of the Moon," whence, on the previous journey, leaving Major Burton to recover from the sickness and fatigue induced by the arduous exploration of Lake Tanganyika, Captain Speke started on his own account, and effected the important discovery of the southern extremity of Lake Victoria. Our travellers appear to have been detained some time at this spot by the difficulties of obtaining porters, and other obstacles, and to have even had to return to it, after a start northwards had been effected. The country between Zanzibar and Kazeh is described by Captain Grant as presenting three separate districts. The first or littoral district-Uzaramo-is on a gentle slope, and consists principally of park-like glades, one third being under cultivation. The finest portion is on the Kingani River, the course of which is often overarched by luxuriant creepers. The second district is that of Usagara, and consists of hills and elevated valleys. The East African mountains, called the Rubeho, at this point, are crossed when half way through, and the green valleys are intersected by rivulets, on whose banks numerous herds of cattle feed luxuriously. Ugogo, the third district, is an elevated plateau about three thousand feet above the sea level. The continual rains produce rich crops and picturesque verdure. The Meunda, or Mkhali, a more or less desert region, separates Ugogo from the extensive region of Unyamwezi, of which Kazeh is the commercial centre, and which is described by Captain Grant as a rolling country, with sharp bursts of rock here and there between broad valleys, containing numerous herds of plump cattle. The party found here plenty of water, and supplies of every kind.

From Kazeh, or Unyanyembi, as it is also called, Captain Speke struck upon a different route to that which he had pursued on his first visit to the lake in 1861, and which he was given to understand by the Arab ivory-merchants would lead him to a creek on the western side of Lake Victoria, situated on the southern boundary of the kingdom of Karagwé. Our travellers' route thus lay across Uzinza-a country which had never before been visited by the white man-and which commenced with tracts of undulating forest, which were again succeeded by picturesque valleys, whose western slopes were boldly scarped. The people were described by Captain Grant, in a communication made to the Ethnological Society, as the best farmers seen in the whole course of the journey. Instead, however, of the creek of Lake Victoria, which they were in search of, they found a new lake, called Uzige, which appeared to have contained once a considerable amount of water, but was then fast drying up. The head of this lake, according to Captain Speke, in a communication made to the Royal Geographical Society, lies in Urundi, and circling round the south and east flanks of Karagwé, in the form of a mountain valley, it is subsequently drained by the Kitangulé River into Lake Victoria, but not in sufficient quantity to make any sensible impression on the perennial contents of the Victoria basin. This kingdom of Urundi, here noticed, is described by Major Burton as having a frontage on Lake Tanganyika of about fifty miles, a low strip of exceeding fertility, backed at short distances by a band of high green hills. This region, rising from Lake Tanganyika in a north-easterly direction, culminates into the equatorial mass of highlands, which, under the name of Karagwah (Karagwé of

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