ESQUIMAU WOMAN. SKETCHED FROM LIFE, 310 GEORGE WASHINGTON DE LONG, 313 HERALD ISLAND, 317 IN THE PACK, 321 WHERE THE BODIES WERE FOUND, 323 NOROS AND NINDEMANN, 326 FINDING THE BODIES, 328 THE GORILLA (TROGLODYTES GORILLA), 334 A VILLAGE OF DWARFS, 339 A PIGMY WARRIOR, 342 A DWARF PRISONER, 345 ARROWS OF THE AFRICAN PIGMIES, 348 THE HUT WHERE LIVINGSTONE DIED, 352 MAP SHOWING POSITION AND BOUNDARIES OF THE CONGO STATE, 355 TIPPU TIB, 359 EMIN PASHA, 363 FINDING NELSON IN DISTRESS AT STARVATION CAMP, 366 A STOCKADED CAMP, 370 RUWENZORI (THE SNOWY MOUNTAIN), IDENTIFIED BY STANLEY WITH "THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON," 372 EXPLORERS AND TRAVELLERS I. LOUIS JOLIET, RE-DISCOVERER OF THE MISSISSIPPI. If one should ask which is the most important river basin in the world, there is no doubt that the Mississippi would be named, with its million and a quarter square miles of area and its twenty-five or more billions of aggregated wealth. Favored in climate, soil, and navigable streams, and endowed with practically inexhaustible veins of coal, copper, iron, and silver, feeding the world with its hundreds of millions of bushels of corn and wheat, and clothing it by other millions of bales of cotton, it is hardly so astonishing that within 217 years from its discovery by Joliet this greatest of river basins should be the abiding-place of twenty-seven and a half millions of people. Speaking of Joliet, Bancroft wrote that his short voyage brought him immortality; but in the irony of fate his explorations have not even given his name a place in the last edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In writing on American explorers, it seems most fitting that this series of sketches should be headed by this Canadian, whose name is scarcely known by one in a thousand. That aught is obtainable concerning the details of his life is due to the investigations of Shea, which later were admirably summed up by Parkman. [Illustration: Signature of Jolliet (Old Spelling).] Louis Joliet, the son of John Joliet and Mary d'Abancour, was born at Quebec, September 21, 1645. His father was a wagon-maker, in the service of the Company of One Hundred Associates, then owners of Canada.