considerable space in which we are likely to find either new animals, or a new flora of any but scientific importance. The kind of delight which woke among men when the first giraffe was caught, or the first kangaroo was exactly sketched, is not, we fear, a delight reserved for this generation. There is just a faint hope of such a “find” when we get fairly inside New Guinea; but it is only faint. There may be a buried city somewhere in the back of Peru, as interesting as the ruined city in Cambodia, and Yucatan might repay much more patient searching than it has received; while there are spaces in Thibet unknown to white men, and a province or two outside Afghanistan which even Russians have not visited. Indeed, if rumor does not lie, they discovered a village a few weeks ago which no official had seen for eighty years, and where the people were entirely self-governing; but the story looks a little mythical, and the people thus discovered were still only Russians. Brazil has not been thoroughly searched, but knowledge of its contents accumulates at Rio, and its less-visited provinces are known to be almost blank; and now Mr. im Thurn, with his patient courage, jumping upwards from rock to rock and tree to tree, has revealed the mystery of Roraima, the secret mountain-top in Guiana which a correspondent of our own first set the world agog to discover. It is a plateau, twelve miles by four, entirely bare of trees, with no animals upon its surface, which is full of small lakes, and with nothing to repay the explorer except the consciousness of victory, a magnificent prospect, and a few orchids which fashionable gardeners will hardly prize. There is no clan living up there isolated from mankind for a few thousand years; and the wonderful animals of which the Indians talked, and which should, if the fear of man is not instinctive, but only a result of centuries of distrust, have trotted up to Mr. im Thurn saying, “Come, sketch me,” existed only in the wild imaginations of men who honestly believe that all dreams are real, and who cannot completely dissociate their own thoughts from the subjects of their thoughts—the possible explanation of many a rare old legend. So disappears one more though remote hope of scientific excitement. There are not many Roraimas in the world; and when some bold gold-seeker has traversed Eastern Peru, and some adventurous Frenchman, with muskets for sale, has forced his way up among the Shans behind Laos, and the African land-grabbers have met, as they will meet, and the first Australian has killed the first German in the centre of New Guinea, there will be little left for the explorer, who now shakes his head over the wonderful dream we heard a missionary recount thirty-five years ago,—that in the depths of Australia we might yet discover a buried town, and evidences of a civilisation which had rotted-down till its survivor was only an aborigine who had forgotten fire. How that discovery would delight the Duke of Argyll,