In botany, as in vertebrate zoology, Barotseland is part of the region which lies between the Kwanza and Zambezi rivers on the south, and the main-stream of the Congo on the north, from Lake Mweru to the Atlantic Ocean. It has a sufficient rainfall, from 22 inches in the south-west to 42 inches in the north-east, to maintain a fairly luxuriant flora as well as powerful rivers. North of the confluence of the Kabompo and the Liambai or Liba (the Upper Zambezi), there seems to have been seventy years ago a luxuriant belt of forest stretching northwards and occupying the mountainous region between the Liba-Zambezi and the Kabompo or Lulafuta. The average elevation of the Barotse Valley, south of this confluence, ranges from a little under 3,000 feet at Sesheke to about 3,600 feet at the juncture of the Zambezi and the Kabompo; but the forested country between these rivers must rise in part to at least 4,500 feet. The richness of this forest seems to have made an immense impression on Livingstone in the middle of the ’fifties. Up till then, coming from South Africa through Bechuanaland, he had at most seen scattered trees with occasionally a fine solitary umbrageous specimen, or a palm thicket. But above the confluence of these two rivers he evidently plunged (when he had to land) into a woodland comparable with the splendid forests of the Congo or the Cameroons. His _Missionary Travels_ contains some very good word-painting of the grand growth of the trees, the deep gloom of the forest depths as contrasted with the shadeless glare of Bechuanaland. In spite of the incessantly rainy weather—and in this little-explored region the yearly rainfall must be far in excess of the modest estimate quoted by travellers in the Barotse park-land and plateaux—Livingstone found considerable pleasure in here seeing—for the first time—the _real_ forest display of Central Africa. North of the Zambezi-Kabompo junction Livingstone noticed the increasing growth of the bamboo on the uplands, as a skirting of the great display of tropical forest which so deeply impressed him as he followed the northward course of the main Zambezi. This—or these—bamboos recur on the elevated plateaux of Eastern Barotseland, and extend over a good deal of the upland on either side of the Upper Kafue, as well as over the five thousand feet crest of the Congo boundary. No doubt they may also be observed within the north-western limits of Barotseland. They are seemingly of the same types as the bamboos of Nyasaland and the elevated portions of Northern Rhodesia south of Tanganyika, and in such case belong to the _Oxytenanthera_ and _Arundinaria_ genera. The only other genus of _arboreal_ bamboo in Africa is _Oreobambos_; but that, I think, is confined in its range to Abyssinia and the Snow mountains of East Equatorial Africa.