In the following map we see a reproduction of Sebastian Cabot’s map in the sixteenth century. I have omitted the pictures of elephants and crocodiles, great emperors and dwarfs, which are freely scattered over the map with somewhat odd taste. The three lakes have arranged themselves in line again, and the Mountains of the Moon are picturesquely banked at the top head of all the streams, but the continent evidently suggests unsteadiness generally, judging from the form of it. That from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century very little further knowledge respecting the sources of the Nile was known may be proved by the map of my school-days, which follows. There is a distinct retrogression by the determined stupidity of the map-maker. All that we had gathered since the days of old Homer down to the seventeenth century--all the lakes are swept away--the Mountains of the Moon run from about 5° to about 10° north of the equator, and extend from Long. 20° to the Gulf of Aden. We simply owe our ignorance to the map-makers. We no sooner discover some natural feature than it is removed in a next issue. [Illustration: THE NILE SOURCES ACCORDING TO GEOGRAPHERS OF THE 16^{TH} & 17^{TH} CENTURIES] [Sidenote:1889. June. The Nile.] The arbitrariness of the modern map-maker is as bad as that of his predecessors. In a late German map, for instance, considered to be the best in Germany, there is a large bay removed altogether from the Victoria Nyanza, and a straight line, drawn by pure caprice, usurps the place of a very interesting and much indented coastline, explored by me in 1875. Speke’s Lake Urigi is jostled to the east, shunted to the north; Ukerewe is utterly out of order, and the Tanganika has a great bay named after a person who had followed in the steps of six preceding investigators. Lake Leopold II. narrowly escaped being sponged out because two Germans, Kund (?) and Tappenbeck, had lost their way, and could not find it; but in the meantime an English missionary visited it, and it was left in peace. English map-makers are quite as capricious. This map, for instance, which has made such cruel and wicked changes of Homer, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and others, was published by Constable in 1819, in a fit of aggravated biliousness no doubt. Hugh Murray, a compiler of African travels, published in London, 1818, a book called an ‘Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in Africa,’ and as he has been an industrious collator of testimony which the best authors of twenty centuries could furnish, I avail myself of his assistance. He says: “Herodotus shows himself to have known the course of the Nile higher probably than it has been traced by any modern European.