Now if it be true that the people of Damot have emigrated from Gojam, the Abbay must be well known to them, because Gros-Damot lies between water, which partly encompasses Gojam, the Gojab, and the Didesa. I do not altogether understand how he can reject the testimony of the people of Damot, on the futile ground that they descended from Gojam. If this nation now extends up to the summit of the sources, so must they also know from their primeval acquaintance with the Abbay, whether their waters pour into the Abbay or not. Though the exploration of the mouth of the Niger has also cost much labour and time; and though Dutch simplicity or craft still makes the Rhine flow into the Waal, yet it is more natural for a nation dwelling on a river to know in what direction it flows, than to be able to give the direction of the curves and windings of its tributaries towards the sources. And is it likely, that a people whom he calls aborigines, and who must therefore be acquainted with their home, should not know whether the river runs towards the south or to the north, in a stream territory with which they are well acquainted? The second decision of D’Abbadie, that the larger mass of water decides a source or a tributary, overthrows entirely his third and most essential one, viz. that one ought to look at the direction of the river; because, in truth, he has neither followed the latter as far as the White Nile, nor to the Sobàt, whose sources appear to him a mere bagatelle. It almost seems as if he chivalrously cut asunder the Gordian knot of that entanglement of rivers during his hermitage in Iaka, and has tried to force on us a vague hypothesis as being the real matter of fact. There is a strange controversy in the relation of his journey of discovery, which ought to be sifted closely. He had _long_ passed over the mountain-chain of Nare, when he took up his abode in the Forest of Babia, having arrived, as he expressly declares, from the basin of the Abbay (Blue Nile) into that of the White Nile; and yet he had, on his right, the sources of the Didesa, a tributary of the _Blue_ Nile. According to this statement, he has never issued from the combination of streams of the Blue Nile, or he has come to a point to which rivers flow, as in Paradise, from all four corners of the world. All this is not exactly adapted to make us believe that the river Gojab, or Uma (Omo), which springs from those sources, is identical with the _White Nile_. Mr. Charles Johnston has conceived the strange belief that he participates in the views of D’Abbadie; but the good man makes his Gibbee (Durr, Omo) the Gibe and Gojàm of D’Abbadie, _receive_ at last the waters of the Abi (Abbay), in the environs of Fàzogl; consequently he has claims with D’Abbadie to the discovery of the main source of the _Blue Nile_.