tropic forest of Awamba cannot advance its borders. The case is the same on the southern plain of the Albert. We find there a stretch of plain twenty miles long devoted to poor grass, fatal to cattle; then we find eight miles crossed with a thin forest of parachute acacias, with here and there an euphorbia, and then we are in the old, old forest. At every leisure hour my mind reverted to the lessons which I was acquiring in this wonderful region. Time was when Ruwenzori did not exist. It was grassy upland, extending from Unyoro to the Balegga plateau. Then came the upheaval at a remote period; Ruwenzori was raised to the clouds, and a yawning abyss 250 miles long and thirty miles broad lay S.W. and N.E. The tropic rains fell for ages; they filled the abyss to overflowing with water, and in time it found an outlet through what is known under the modern name of Equatoria. The outflowing water washed the earth away along its course, down to the bed-rock, and for countless ages, through every second of time, it has been scouring it away, atom by atom, to form Lower Egypt and fill the Mediterranean, and in the meantime the bottom of the abyss has been silting up with the sediment and débris of Ruwenzori, with the remains of uncountable generations of fish, with unnumbered centuries of dead vegetation, until now, with the wearing away of the dykes of rock and reefs in the course of the White Nile, two lakes have been formed; and other dykes of rock appeared between the lakes, first as clusters of islets, then covered with grass; finally, they caught the soil brought down by glaciers, moraines have connected rock to rock, and have formed a valley marvellous in its growth of tropic forest, and on each side of this forest there are plains undergoing the slow process of crystalline transformation, and on their lake borders you see yet an intermediate stage in the daily increasing mud, and animal and vegetable life add to the height of it, and presently it will be firm dry ground. Now dip a punting-pole into the shallows at the south end of Lake Albert, and the pole drops into five feet of ooze. It is the sediment borne down from the slopes of Ruwenzori by the tributaries into the Semliki, and thence by the Semliki into the still waters of the lake. And if we sound the depths of Lake Albert Edward, the pole drops through four or five feet of grey mud, to which are attached thousands of mica flakes and comminuted scales and pulverized bones of fish, which emit an overpowering stench. And atom by atom the bed-rock between the forest of Awamba and the Lake Albert Edward is being eroded and scoured away, until, by-and-by, the lake will have become dry land, and through the centre of it will meander the Semliki, having gathered the tributaries from Ruwenzori, the Ankori, and Ruanda uplands, to itself; and in the course of time, when the nitrous and acrid properties have been well scoured off the plain, and the humus