yet one further illustration of the almost infinite ramifications to which natural selec

tion and its associated doctrines of development may be applied. [From Macmillan's Magazine.

WHATEVER may be the ultimate result of Dr. Livingstone's researches, it is not to be doubted that his name will be for ever associated with the history of the Nile. He is by far the greatest of all modern explorers. He has ventured more, seen more, and thrown a clearer light on the hydrography of Central Africa, than all his predecessors put together. Still, a cloud of doubt hangs suspended over the exit of the waters, among whose innumerable springs he has so long wandered; and it is to clear up, once for all, the mystery of their course, that he voluntarily condemns himself to remain an anchorite in unknown wilds and forests, for we know not how many years. He hopes, indeed, to complete his work in two years; but considering how much his previous stay has been protracted, we may fairly conclude that his return within that period is doubtful. Meanwhile, we observe with regret several marks of a disposition to disparage his labors, by attempting to prove that there exists no connection between the streams he has discovered and the river of Egypt. It would be unjust to say that Captains Speke and Grant discovered nothing, because they made us acquainted with the course and character of the Kitangûle, which is certainly one of the feeders of the Nile; but their notion, that the Victoria N'yanza is the source of that river, is as irreconcilable with their own narrative as it is with the science of geography. They saw part of a lake, and heard a great deal about the rest of it; but they neither discovered its dimensions, nor how it is fed, nor how many streams fall into it, nor with what system of lakes it is connected at its southern extremity. All these points are still unknown, and so also is the source of the Kitangûle. Nothing, therefore, could be more unfounded than their pretension to have discovered the source of the Nile. It is highly probable that the stream which runs out of the Victoria N'yanza is one branch, and perhaps a principal branch of the Nile; but as they did not follow its course from the lake to its junction with

the Blue River, this probability does not amount to certainty. They have given, we admit, satisfactory reasons why they did not follow the great sweep which the river makes towards the west, and the extent of which is still unknown; and though, proceeding northwards, they came to a river, which they assumed to be the same as that they had left, they may have been mistaken, for, after parting company with it for a hundred miles, they could not be more sure that they were dealing with the same stream, than Dr. Livingstone in his assumed identification of the Lualaba with the Bahr-el-Gazal.

We are far from deciding dogmatically that the ridge of uplands, and the peaks that tower from their summit, are the Mountains of the Moon; they are situated about eleven degrees south of what Captain Speke assumes to be the Lunar Mountains of Ptolemy; but instead of contenting himself with transient glimpses of these terrene elevations, Dr. Livingstone patiently plodded along six hundred miles of the watershed, examining and describing in noble language his impressions of what he saw by the way. He has not beheld the whole, and does not say he has; on the contrary, he tells us that there remains yet a hundred miles of the watershed, and the most important hundred miles, which he has not visited. The reader who remembers the gorgeous picture which Buffon has drawn of the primitive earth, may im agine himself among its wastes and wilds, as he peruses Dr. Livingstone's descriptions of the spongy fountains, the morasses, the shallow lakes, hundreds of miles in length, the impenetrable forests which the traveller skirted, the wild buffalo and elephant tracks, in which the unwary wanderer often sinks to the thigh, where the foot of the huge beast has been, the reedy pools, many miles in length, resembling the mangrove swamps on the coast, the tor-like peaks, impending far up among the hills over runnels and fountains yet unvisited. As we have already said, it is not our intention to be positive where the

great traveller himself is not: after all his researches, he observes very modestly that he may be mistaken, and in that case expresses his readiness to confess his error; but if his own observations, and the testimony of natives whom he knows and trusts, can be relied upon, all the wealth of waters descending from the Lunar Mountains do certainly flow in a northerly direction, whether they ultimately unite with the Egyptian flood or not. The reason he gives for his own belief that it is the great valley in which the united waters flow, sometimes spreading into large lakes, sometimes forming huge lacustrine rivers, is, that the depression is hemmed in by high lands on the west as well as on the east, so that, up to the fourth degree of south latitude at least, he could perceive nothing to lessen his belief in the junction of the Lualaba with the great western arm of the Nile. Still, when his researches northward were interrupted at the fourth degree of south latitude, he had reached an immense sheet of water, which he calls the unknown lake, terminating, as he was assured by the natives, in extensive reedy swamps, which he persuaded himself must in the end join the Bahr-el-Gazal.

Both Captain Grant and Dr. Beke have written letters to the Times, in which they maintain that Dr. Livingstone's theory is impossible. An eminent German botanist, Dr. Schweinfurth, has discovered, they say, the source of that river in five degrees north latitude. But are they or the German botanist quite sure that the Bahr-el-Gazal has but one source? May it not, like the Bahr-el-Abiad, have many springs? so that, without disparaging the botanist's testimony, we may believe in the practicability of conducting the waters of the Lualaba into the Bahr-el-Gazal. But here Dr. Beke interposes another obstacle, which he considers insurmountable: the river Uelle traverses, he affirms, the line of march which the Lualaba must follow in its attempt to unite its forces with those of the western branch of the Nile. But with all due respect for the science of travellers whether at home or abroad, we have less faith than Dr. Beke in the astronomical observations by which the latitude and longitude of new places and heads of rivers are often determined. The Uelle may follow its occidental track in peace, and yet leave room for the north-eastern course of the Lualaba. However, as, from all these conflicting

ideas, it is obvious that certainty has not yet been attained, we persuade ourselves that the public will be content to await the result of Dr. Livingstone's final researches, which, whether they establish his previous theory or not, he will assuredly divulge to the world in their utmost completeness. For some time, it is well known, the chief of African travellers was supposed to be dead, his journals lost, his discoveries handed over to oblivion. Several languid endeavors were made by the scientific gentlemen of this country to discover his fate, or afford him succor if still alive. But causes on which we decline to dwell frustrated their attempts, and it was left for the correspondent of the New York Herald to explore the explorer, and show to England her bold son displaying the hereditary virtues of his race in the untrodden wilds of Central Africa. The name of Mr. Stanley, who carried the design of the New York Herald into execution, is now almost as well known as that of Livingstone himself, and respected wherever it is known. The meeting of the explorer and his deliverer near the banks of the Tanganyika Lake is characteristic of British coolness and daring. Informed by a servant of the approach of a white man, Livingstone advanced to meet him, and, at the head of a small caravan, beheld the stars and stripes flaunting in the African breeze. He was therefore not left to conjecture from what quarter his deliverance was approaching. He is not one of those who care on which side of the Atlantic an Englishman is born, or whether he happens to be called an American or a Scotchman; it is enough that he is one of the leading race among mankind, which he feels himself also to be.

The communications of Livingstone himself to the Foreign Office, his letters to the New York Herald, and those of Mr. Stanley, giving an account of his proceedings in Africa, have made the public familiar with the leading facts of the case; it is not with these, therefore, that we have to deal, but with some important questions, geographical and physiological, arising out of them. Dr. Livingstone is a man of warm and grateful feelings-emotional, though not demonstrative; and as he has received numerous benefits from the Africans of the interior, he is naturally disposed to think kindly and judge favorably of them. But kindness is one thing, and science another, Men and women with whom he has for

years maintained friendly relations, can hardly appear to him in the same light in which they would be viewed by a new and impartial observer. He tells us himself, that after living for a while among black people, you cease to be conscious that they are black; as by the same metamorphosis of feeling, you cease to be conscious that ugly people are ugly. Men who marry plain women, if they happen to be gifted with a loving disposition, soon forget the want of symmetry in their features, or of proportion in their figure, and, misled by the force of expression, absolutely regard them as beautitul. It seems to us that, under some such influence as this, Dr. Livingstone has been betrayed into the entertaining of a far more favorable opinion of the structure and appearance of the Manyema, for example, whom he himself describes as ruthless cannibals, than a physiognomist would consider defensible. Some travellers have said that the negroes pity us because we are white, and possibly also because our heads are not woolly. There is no accounting for tastes; but among the multitudes of black people whom we have seen and known, no example has occurred of an individual who preferred the negro countenance to that of the European. We are consequently disposed to demur to Dr. Livingstone's theory of the physique of Central Africans, whom he looks upon as superior in many respects to our own countrymen, especially such as have applied themselves to physiological studies.

Six years of familiarity with thick luscious lips,' and locks which a poodle might envy, have sometimes led him to view us, descendants of the Vikings and Gauls, from a comic point of view. For instance, in the following passage: 'If a comparison were instituted, and Manyema taken at random, placed opposite, say, the members of the Anthropological Society of London, clad like them in kilts of grass-cloth, I should like to take my place alongside the Manyema, on the principle of preferring the company of my betters-the philosophers would look wofully scraggy.' But though the inferior race,' as we compassionately call them, have finely formed heads and often handsome features, they are undoubtedly cannibals. Elsewhere, reasoning in the same vein, he says: I happened to be present when all the head men of the great chief, Insama, who lives west of the south end of the Tanganyika, had

come together to make peace with certain Arabs who had burned their chief town, and I am certain one could not see more finely formed intellectual heads in any assembly in London or Paris, and the faces and forms correspond with the finely shaped heads.' The men being fashioned after this type, we naturally inquire what sort of persons are their helpmates? Are they also finely formed, with intellectual heads and elegantly proportioned bodies? Dr. Livingstone replies: Many of the women were very pretty, and, like all ladies, would have been much prettier if they had only let themselves alone. Fortunately, the dears could not change their charming black eyes, beautiful foreheads, nicely rounded limbs, well shaped forms, and small hands and feet.' Further on, he adds: 'Cazembé's queen would be esteemed a real beauty, either in London, Paris, or New York.' In a village of Upper Egypt, we saw one black beauty with features as regular as those of a Grecian statue, and hair long and flexible as that of a Greek or Englishwoman. Inquiring whence she came, it appeared that no one could tell-somewhere from the interior, was the reply, but from what part of the interior, it was impossible to learn. She had come huddled among a multitude of cap tive negresses, whom she regarded with as much scorn as if she had been an Iapetian of the purest blood. Could she have been brought from Manyema ? The complexion decided in the negative. They, as Livingstone assures us, are of a rich warm brown color-she was as black as ebony. Leaving this question unsolved, we follow Dr. Livingstone in his speculations on the original type of the negro, which, with Winwood Reade, he is inclined to discover in the ancient Egyptian. Here dogmatism would be peculiarly out of place, since investigation has not yet revealed to us who the ancient Egyptians were. The geographers and philosophers of antiquity were of opinion that Africa commenced west of the Nile, at the line which separates the cultivated country from the Desert. The Egyptians, therefore, in their view, were Asiatics, probably of Semitic origin, and closely allied to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. To study their monuments carefully, and to behold in them indications of a physiological affinity with the African races, we hold to be impossible. Instead of round, they have almond-shaped

eyes, with lips rather thin than thick, slender figures, and long, flexible hair. The nose is not depressed, as Winwood Reade supposes, but straight, like that of the Arabs. Occasionally, mummies have been found with red hair; and from among such individuals, victims were occasionally selected, and sacrificed to Typhon. Their opinions, their rites, their ceremonies, their philosophy, their religion, were almost identical with those of the Phoenicians, and never suggest to a philosophical student the slightest trace of African origin. One of the least explicable problems in the science of ethnology is that repugnance to civilisation, or absolute incapacity to profit by its teaching, which, from the beginning of time, has characterised the black races. As far as we can discover, they have always been cannibals; while the masses of the population have as invariably been slaves, whether at home or abroad. An old Greek poet divided mankind into three classes-one consisting of men who could discover truth for themselves; a second, of men who could not discover it for themselves, but could accept it when it had been discovered by others; and a third, who could neither do the one nor the other-whom, in his rough way of speaking, he called wretches, without use or value.' We would not apply this language to the black races, nor perhaps would the old poet, if he were required to deliver his opinion in prose; but the fact is certain, that while the nations of Semitic and Iapetian origin have invented a civilisation for themselves, the Africans have remained from time immemorial unimproved, and apparently unimprovable, at least beyond a certain point. When Dr. Livingstone returns to this country, and places his matured views before the world, we are persuaded he will introduce many great modifications into his ethnological theory. No one knows better than he that numerous efforts have been vainly made to diffuse the light of knowledge among the African populations by the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs. But the head of the African has proved impenetrable to the darts of enlightenment, whether social, moral, or religious. Nothing can be more completely removed from the ethical system of civilised mankind than the practice of cannibalism, which, nevertheless, appears to be not naturally repugnant to the interior

6

African. The Manyema women, Dr. Livingstone says, keep aloof from the hideous banquets of the men; but in the West India Islands, more especially in Hayti, it is the women who take the lead in the practice of cannibalism, which they carry to its most shocking excess, by devouring their own children. How barbarous nations are to be civilised, seems not yet to have been discovered in modern times. Dr. Livingstone describes the result of his own researches as the rediscovery of facts well known to antiquity; and it would be well for us if we could rediscover the methods by which the Greeks and Romans civilised the races among whom they planted colonies. When modern Europeans settle in the midst of savages, they immediately commence the process of extermination, which they generally complete in a period more or less protracted; and when they fail, it is only when the multitudes with whom they have to deal are vastly too numerous to be cut off. The Red Indians of North America have dwindled from fifteen or sixteen millions to about a million and a half, and will soon disappear altogether. The natives of Newfoundland have long ago retreated to the 'happy huntinggrounds,'

Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. So, again, in Tasmania, not a trace remains of its once vigorous and numerous population; the black race is fast dying out in Australia, the cannibal in New Zealand, and if we do not extirpate the Hindus and Mohammedans of India, it is because the effort exceeds our strength. Were it not for this phenomenon, we should exceedingly regret that conquest and annexation were not the result of the Abyssinian

war.

Once firmly planted in those highlands, and opening commercial relations with the Africans of the interior, the probability is that we should have exerted as beneficial an influence on their minds and manners as they are capable of receiving. When Cazembé-the beauty of whose queen has been above spoken of-had conversed with Dr. Livingstone, he said that from the first specimen of the English he had seen, he liked them, and evinced his liking by treating the traveller with much consideration. He might not have liked them so well, had his country become a province of our colonial empire. Com

merce, however, quietly insinuates into barbarous populations the good which conquest endeavors to force upon them. The merchant, with a string of blue beads in his hand, is often more potent than a dragoon with his sword. The women befriend the bringer of beads, and the persons whom they befriend are generally able to effect much among savages. Had Abyssinia become the receptacle of all such articles of European manufacture as would be adapted to the tastes of the natiyes, many of which they have never yet beheld, a peaceable passage would be readily granted through their country to every Englishman. The only races who would have had cause to regret our close vicinity would have been those of the elephant and lion, whom we should certainly have destroyed in a comparatively short space of time. The existence of the lion in any country is an indubitable proof of a low state of civilisation; he had already disappeared from Greece in mythical times; in Persia and in the Nedjed, as well as in India, he maintained his ground to our own day; but he has now become extinct in Asia as well as in Europe; and had we 'planted ourselves firmly in Central Africa, as we have long done in the south, lions' skins would have become a scarce article in the markets of the world.

The necessity of our advent among the cannibals of Manyema is clearly shown by many passages in Dr. Livingstone's letters. The natives are not without industry; they cultivate the soil largely, and have carried the useful arts so far as to be able to smelt iron and copper; yet they have made but small progress in the affairs of social life. 'There is not a single great chief in all Manyema—no matter what name the different divisions of people bear-Manyema, Balegga, Babire, Bazire, Bakoos-there is no political cohesion, not one king or kingdom. Each head man is independent of every other.' The women play a distinguished part in the business of these countries; they dive for oysters, and are expert in many other kinds of industry. The principal part of the trade is in their hands. 'Markets are held at stated times, and the women attend them in large numbers, dressed in their best. They are light-col

ored, have straight noses, and are finely formed. They are keen traders, and look on the market as a great institution; to haggle and joke, and laugh and cheat, seem the enjoyments of life.' The population, especially west of the river, is prodigiously large.

'Near Lomame, the Bakuss or Bakoons cultivate coffee, and drink it highly scented with vanilla. Food of all kinds is extremely abundant and cheap.' Hereafter, when Dr. Livingstone comes to arrange his materials, draw inferences from his own statements, and estimate the value of different facts, he will doubtless be able to paint a consistent picture of the Central Africans, who contrast favorably, as far at least as morals are concerned, with the halfcaste Arabs-I mean in Dr. Livingstone's opinion. In everything which distinguishes man from man they are as inferior to the real Arab as the Chinese is to the Englishman. Their superstitions are the lowest and most grovelling prevalent among the human race. The least benighted among them are Manichæans of the rudest stamp, that is, have conceived some idea of a good spirit and a bad one, and point out a hot spring in one of their valleys as coming up directly from the quarters of the latter. Contrast with these notions the grand simple creed of the Muslims-La illah il Ullah-There is no God but God,' the words in which they express their belief in the unity of the Divine essence. A few years ago, there sprang up a sort of revival among the Arabs of Arabia Proper, who burst into Africa with a comparatively small number of conquering bands, and swept everything before them almost as far south as our settlements; upon which the English bishop of the Cape observed, that he thought it matter of congratulation that the truths of el Islam were thus substituted for the grovelling fetishism of the blacks this movement from the East soon slackened, and has left no other trace than increased appetite for marauding and kidnapping among the inferior races, for Dr. Livingstone must admit that the people which invariably succumbs to another people are certainly their inferiors.

But

[Chambers's Journal.