Critics are in the habit of omitting almost all mention of maps when attached to books of travel. This is not quite fair. Mine have cost me more labour than the note-taking, literary work, sketching, and photographing combined. In the aggregate, the winding of the three chronometers daily for nearly three years, the 300 sets of observations, the calculation of all these observations, the mapping of the positions, tracing of rivers, and shading of mountain ranges, the number of compassbearings taken, the boiling of the thermometers, the records of the varying of the aneroids, the computing of heights, and the notes of temperature, all of which are necessary for a good map, have cost me no less than 780 hours of honest work, which, say at six hours per day, would make 130 working days. If there were no maps accompanying books of this kind it would scarcely be possible to comprehend what was described, and the narrative would become intolerably dry. I relegate the dryness to the maps, by which I am relieved from tedious description, at the same time that they minister to my desire of being clear, and are beautiful, necessary, and interesting features of the book; and I am firmly convinced that with a glance at the profile map of Ruwenzori, the Semliki Valley, and Lakes Albert Edward and Albert, the reader will know more of the grand physical features of this region than he knew of the surroundings of Lake Michigan. As we descend from Karimi to the basin of the Albert Edward the first thing we become conscious of is that we are treading the dry bed of a lake. We do not require a gifted geologist to tell us that. Five feet of rise to the lake would increase its extent five miles to the north and five miles to the south. Fifty feet of rise would restore the lake to its old time-honoured condition, when its waves rolled over the pebbled beach under the shadows of the forest near Mtsora. We find that we really needed to pay this visit to the shores of the Albert Edward to thoroughly understand the physical changes which have, within the last few hundred years, diminished the former spacious lake to its present circumscribed limits. We should be liable to censure and severe criticism if we attempted to fix a hard and fast date to the period when Lake Albert extended to the forest of Awamba from the north, and Lake Albert Edward extended from the south over the plain of Makara to the southern edge of the forest. But it does not need a clever mathematician to calculate the number of years which have elapsed since the Semliki channeled its bed deep enough to drain the Makara plain. It is easily computable. The nitrous, saline, and acrid properties deposited over the plain by the receding lake have not been thoroughly scoured out yet. The grass is nutritious enough for the hardy cattle, the dark euphorbia, the acacia, and thorn-bush find along the edges of the plain a little thin humus of decayed grass; but nine-tenths of it is grassy plain, and the