termination of the Niger, that which supposes it to be a 'branch of the Nile, is the most unfounded, and the least con'sistent with acknowledged facts.' This Writer inclines to the 'splendid and imposing hypothesis first started by a Mr. Maxwell, and adopted by Park himself, which identifies the Niger with the Zaire or Congo. To this we shall presently advert. A third opinion is that of D'Anville and Major Rennell, who assign to it an inland termination in the swamps or sands of Wangara. This has been stoutly combated by the Author of a fourth hypothesis, M. Reichard, who gives the Niger an outlet in the Gulf of Guinea, by the Rio Formosa and the Rio del Rey. To this opinion, M. Malte Brun seems to give the preference; and Mr. Murray cannot help suspecting that the great water which Park heard of at Sansanding, as situated about a month to the southward of that place, called the Ba Sea Feena, may have been the Gulf of Guinea. He has suggested, however, a fifth hypothesis, which makes the Niger from the west, meet the Nile of Abulfeda flowing from the east, by falling into a common receptacle. The sixth and last hypothesis is that of the present Writer.

The Niger-Congo hypothesis, which Sir Rufane Donkin stigmatizes as a sort of geographical Centaur', had the singular good fortune to be warmly espoused, some years ago, in each of our leading quarterly journals; and it gave rise to the disastrous expedition under Captain Tuckey. The result of that expedition, it has been alleged, has made no alteration in the state of the question, excepting that the information pro'cured on that voyage, went far to establish the fact of the Zaire having its origin to the northward of the Equator.'

So it does, doubtless', remarks Sir R. D.; and I place them with much confidence in the southern face of the great range of mountains which runs across Africa from the southern end of the Red Sea to Cape Verd, which Cape it forms; and this great range, before it dips finally under the Atlantic, shews some of its loftiest and westernmost summits above the waves, under the name of the Cape de Verd Islands.'. . . . To this mountain range, broken or unbroken, I go for the sources of the Congo,-where they will rise sufficiently far off, and to the northward, to give an ample length of course to the river before it reaches the Atlantic; for the line I have assumed for that course, runs through about twenty degrees of longitude, and twelve degrees of latitude, which, at a moderate calculation, implies a course of near 2000 miles, by far the greater part of which is through the climate of perpetual rains, to say nothing of the melting of the snows of the mountains, as the sun approaches and passes over them twice in the year and this course will make the river the receptacle, by various

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Quarterly Review, No. XLIV, p. 476.

channels, of probably one-fourth or fifth of all the waters which either rise in or fall on the southern face or subjacent valleys of the great chain of Central Africa. Besides this, the Congo receives, lower down, the immense stream called the Zaire, whose source, from all we know of its general direction, is probably in the Zanguebar Mountains; and which, according to the best accounts we have, flows through the great lake Aquelunda, which damming up in the rainy season an enormous mass of waters, lets them out again gradually, by which the almost equable height and fullness of the Congo, so much remarked on in recent accounts, are maintained in part; while other lakes, formed probably in the long passage of the river flowing from the central great range, would govern and regulate also that branch of the river, so as to produce an equable supply of water to it.' Donkin, pp. 111; 117, 18.

To Mr. Maxwell's argument, that the floods of the Congo commence long before any rains take place south of the Equator, Sir Rufane replies:--

Could any man who had resided within the southern tropic, ever write this? The sun crosses the equator on his way southward on the 21st of September, and from that time forward in his progress to the tropic of Capricorn, he pours down his torrents on all the intermediate regions; so that the Congo "beginning to swell perceptibly in the month of October," would precisely accord with the tropical rains which fell in September, when the sun crossed the equator; and so far from no "heavy rains" setting in "before the end of December," that was the period at which the train of tropical clouds had discharged full one-half of all they had to give to the southern hemisphere, and by the "end of December" the sun would be already in his way back to distribute the other half. But besides all this most extraordinary_reasoning against the course of nature, and against known fact, Mr. Maxwell reasons too on the assumption, that the Congo, like some other great rivers, is subject to great periodical risings; whereas all the latest and best accounts, (and Mr. Maxwell, from his long residence in that quarter, one would think might have anticipated them,) agree in representing the Congo as flowing onward in an uninterrupted volume of equable grandeur at all seasons, rising, at the most, not above 9 feet; a phenomenon which I have attributed above to the probable regulating influence of large lakes, whose nature it would be to keep up such an equability of supply, and which not occurring, as far as we know, in the Nile of Egypt, that river sometimes rises 30 feet.

Mr. Maxwell next says, "I believe that our information of the Niger losing itself in the desert, rests solely on the authority of the Romans!" Now, of the Romans, Pliny, as regards the Niger, is, I believe, the chief writer; to say nothing of the fact, that almost all writers, except the Romans, have spoken of the Niger as ending in a desert. Pliny tells us in the clearest manner, that the Nile," which is the name he gives to the river which traverses Central Africa, and which we call the Niger, rises in Mauritania; that King Juba says so,--and that this river and the Nile of Egypt are increased by rains

·

after the same manner. Pliny then goes on tracing his Nile-Niger to the eastward till he gets it into Ethiopia, which he says it divides into two, and here, without one word about a desert, Pliny makes the Niger join the Egyptian Nile, and then flow into the sea.

I am only surprised that Mr. Maxwell's theory should have been supported, as it has been, by several literary men; and it is to be lamented that poor Park's head was confused with so wrong a notion, and which appears to have stuck by him, and to have actuated his hopes, and probably influenced his actions to the very last.' pp. 120

122.

Our Writer's own hypothesis may be briefly explained as follows. First of all, he supposes the Geir of Ptolemy to be the modern Misselad, which flowing from the copper-mines of Fertit, (assumed to be the Pharanx Garamantica,) flows into Lake Fittre, (the Nuba of Ptolemy,) while a western branch of this same river formerly flowed out of the Tchad into the Wad el Ghazel, or Bornouese Nile. Secondly, the branch of the 'Ni-Geir issuing, according to Ptolemy, from Mount Thala, is no other than the river Shary, which joining the Ni-Geir at 'the spot where the Lake Tchad is now formed, may be said, in Ptolemy's sense, to join Mount Thala and Mount Man'drus.' And the Yeou, by a singular mistake, is made another branch of this same Ni-Geir. This ingenious but unsubstantial theory, we have already shewn to be altogether erroneous. The only part of the hypothesis that claims further notice, is that which is intended to supply an answer to the inquiry, What becomes of the Geir or Nile of Bornou after it is lodged in the Lake Domboo',-formed, as it is supposed, by the stream from Lake Fittre? 'I am constrained', he says, 'to dispose of it speedily in the desert of Bilmah, where all the ' accounts we have, tell us, the Nile of Bornou ends in sands.' But let not the gentle reader suppose that Sir Rufane Donkin is only leading them this round-about way to the same conclusion as that of D'Anville and Major Rennell, with the mere difference of making the Niger terminate in sands instead of swamps. Unable, he says, to bring himself to think, that a mighty stream, such as he conceives the Nile of Bornou to be, when formed by the united streams of the Niger and the Misselad, can be so disposed of in a sandy desert, without ever reappearing in any shape, he has found an imaginary outlet' be'yond the sands of Bilmah'; the explanation of which must be given in his own words.

The sands of Africa, many of which I have traversed, are generally siliceous but silex, whether comminuted or in a mass, is not an absorbent-it is not a thirsty or retaining substance. If, indeed, the desert of Bilmah were shewn to be made of comminuted chalk, I could conceive a good large river to be drunk up and lost, until the

whole desert announced what was become of the fluid, by being converted into one general pulp; to effect which, I can suppose, taking the immense surface exposed to a tropical sun, and from which the evaporation would be prodigious, it would require perhaps ages on ages. But water flowing into a siliceous sand will act just as freely, and in the same manner, or nearly so, as if there were no sand, except only that its rate of going would suffer a small retardation from friction. It would push on by the force of gravitation till it found its natural level, without any loss by absorption, for silex does not absorb-with little or no evaporation, covered as the water would be by superjacent sand-and with little other loss than the amount of the fluid which might be stopped or dissipated in one way or another by its adherence to the millions of particles through which it would travel, in its journey in search of a level. But this amount could not be great after the first humectation, for each particle of sand coming in contact with the fluid, having taken up mechanically as much as it conld sustain, no addition could be made to that quantity ;—and the several grains of sand being once loaded to the amount of their power of attraction, would refuse to take more, and the fluid thenceforward would pass on undiminished. But what is, or can be, the level towards which I suppose this mighty body of water to be gravitating? I say at once, THE SEA, towards which all rivers tend in one way or another.

I need hardly add, that the sea to which I look as the receptacle of the Nile of Bornou, is the Mediterranean, towards which it tends, from its first exit from near the mines of Fertit; and I at once put my finger on the quicksands of the gulf of Sidra, the ancient Syrtis, as the point at which the Nile of Bornou enters the sea, which, by meeting the stream on a low flat shore, drives back or stops the waters of the river, so that they can flow on no further; they therefore, having now no lower level to go to, form what they would equally have formed in the middle of the sandy desert, had they been dammed up there; namely, a plashy, moving quicksand, which extends towards the land as far as the level will admit, and is stopped only by the gradual rise of the ground. In a word, the size and form of the quicksand adjacent to the coast, implies what Tuckey tells us in his Maritime Geography, that the coast is very low, or, in a word, that the waters of a river and of the sea would be there nearly on a level; one having sometimes the mastery, and sometimes the other.'.

First, this Gulf is in the direct prolongation of the general course of the Nile of Bornou: secondly, it is the nearest point at which a river, disappearing where this river is said to disappear, in the deserts of Bilmah, could reach the sea: and, thirdly, the very phænomenon which I have contended would occur if the river were any where dammed up in its passage, actually does occur in the very line between the Lake Domboo and the Syrtis, if any reliance can be placed on the maps we have, near the rock Tibboo, where water suddenly appears under the name of the "Two Rivers,"-caused, in my opinion, by the damming up of the subarenaceous stream by the ground rising in the vicinity of the Tiberti mountains, which are not very far off, but which appear to be much broken and disconnected in these parts,

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-although still presenting an obstacle sufficient to make the river declare itself, but having surmounted which, the stream sinks, as before, into the sands, and travels onwards to the sea.

'But reasoning from analogy, and still more from what we know of the nature of the country of which I am now more immediately speaking, I have no doubt but that, in very remote ages, the united Niger and Geir, that is the Nile of Bornou, did roll into the sea, in all the magnificence of a mighty stream, forming a grand æstuary or harbour where now the quicksand is: indeed, we find in Herodotus, vestiges of a tradition that the Niger, or Nile, as he calls it, made its way to the Mediteranean; although the historian infers, or some of his transcribers have made him infer, that it does so through the Nile of Egypt.' pp. 59-65.

'Thus has been rubbed out', pathetically exclaims our Author, from the face of the earth, a river which had once its 'cities, its sages, its warriors, its works of art, and its inunda'tions, like the classic Nile, but which so existed in days of 'which we have scarcely a record.' And

in the same way shall perish the Nile of Egypt and its valley, its pyramids, its temples, and its cities. The Delta shall become a plashy quicksand, a second Syrtis; and the Nile shall cease to exist from the Lower Cataract downwards!' p. 69.

We know not what our readers may by this time think of our Author's hypothesis; but we can assure them, if this last paragraph should excite any alarms on behalf of old Egypt, that the Nile is in no danger of such a catastrophe. We shall use as few words as possible in disposing of our Author's hypothesis. In the first place, we have the authority of Captain Beechey for saying, that the Syrtic Gulf presents no such appearance as our Author attributes to it. Its southern termination is a shore very slightly indented, having neither inlet nor port; and the large tract of quicksand usually laid down in that part of the Gulf, has no existence. A chain of marshes, indeed, periodically converted into shallow lakes, extends along the coast from Mesurata to Sooleb; but there is every appearance that these lakes, like those which border the Egyptian Delta, occupy the place of a gulf of the sea. The coast, though now above the level of the marsh, is a low strip of sand, which has apparently 'been formed by the strong current and north-easterly winds. The formation of this bank would convert the gulf into a 'lake; and the accumulation of mud and sediment raising the 'bed of the lake, while the embankment continued to rise, 'would transform the lake into a marsh.' Several ravines or wadys, which are filled by the rains, discharge their torrents

* Modern Traveller. Africa. Vol. I. p. 74, note.