We have known Africa under the delusion that it was a desert, with a fringe of vegetation on the sea coast and in the valley of the Nile. “Africs burning sands” and her benighted races are the beginning and end of our school thoughts of the “Dark Continent.” True, her Sahara is the most unmitigated desert in the world, running from the Atlantic Ocean clear to the Tigris in Asia——for the Red Sea is only a gulf in its midst. True, there is another desert in the far South, almost as blank. These, with their drifting sands, long caravans, ghastly skeletons, fierce Bedouin wanderers, friendly oases, have furnished descriptions well calculated to interest and thrill. But they are by no means the Africa of the future. They are as the shell of an egg, whose life and wonder are in the centre. There are many old stories of African exploration. One is to the effect that a Phœnician vessel, sent out by Pharaoh Necho, left the Red Sea and in three years appeared at the Straits of Gibraltar, having circumnavigated the Continent. But it required the inducement of commercial gain to fix its boundaries exactly, to give it place on the map of the world. Not until a pathway to the east became a commercial necessity, and a short “North West Passage” a brilliant hope, did the era of Arctic adventure begin. The same necessity, and the same hope for a “South East Passage,” led the Portuguese to try all the western coast of Africa for a short cut to the Orient. For seventy years they coasted in vain, till in 1482 Diaz rounded the “Cape of Storms,” afterwards called Cape of Good Hope. Twelve years later Vasco de Gama ran the first European vessel into the ports of India. The first permanent stream found by the Portuguese on going down the Atlantic, or west, coast of Africa was the Senegal River. They thought it a western outlet of the Nile. Here Europe first saw that luxuriant, inter-tropical Africa which differed so much from the Africa of traditions and school books. They knew that something else than a sandy waste was necessary to support a river like the Senegal. They had been used to seeing and reading of the tawny Bedouin wanderers, but south of this river they found a black, stout, well made people, who in contradistinction to the thin, tawny, short Moors of the desert, became Black Moors——“black-a-moors.” And in contrast with the dry, sandy, treeless plains of Sahara they actually found a country verdant, woody, fertile and rolling.