Unhappily the wrongs of the negro began with his first contact with Europeans. The Portuguese took him home as a specimen. He then became a slave. The moral sense of Europe was still medieval. Her maritime nations fastened like leeches on the west coast of Africa and sucked her life blood. Millions of her children were carried off to Brazil, the West Indies, the Spanish Main, and the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. Much as we abhor the slave system of Africa as carried on at present by Turkish dealers, it is no more inhuman than that practiced for three hundred years by the Christian nations of Europe. This slave trade was fatal to discovery and research in Africa, such as was warranted by the knowledge which the Portuguese brought, and which is now warranted, and being realized too, by the recent revelations of Stanley, Livingstone and others. The slaver could not, because he dared not, venture far from his rendezvous on the river or in the lagoon where his victims were collected. He kept his haunts a secret, and closed the doors on all who would be likely to interfere with his gains. Not until slavery received its death blow among civilized nations did they begin to set permanent feet, in a spirit of scientific and christian inquiry, on the interior soil of Africa, and to map out its blank spaces with magnificent lakes and rivers. Then began to come those stirring narratives of travel by Mungo Park, Landers and Clapperton, who tracked the course of the Niger River. Then began that northern march of sturdy and permanent Dutch and English colonists who are carrying their cultivation and civilization from the Southern Cape to the Kalihari Desert, the southern equivalent of the Sahara. Then also a Liberian Free State became possible, founded and ruled by the children of those who had been ruthlessly stolen from their happy equatorial homes and sold into bondage in the United States. Between the two sterile tracts of Africa lies the real Continent. All the coast lands are a shell. Egypt is but a strip on either side the Nile. Central Africa——the Lake regions which feed the Nile, Congo and Zambesi——is a great and grand section, where nature has been prodigal in all her gifts, and which invites a civilization as unique and strong as its physical features. We may wonder at the strange things revealed by Arctic research, but here are unrivalled chains of lake and river communication, and powerful states with strange peoples and customs, of which the last generation never dreamed. No spot of all the earth invites to such adventure as this, and none profiteth so much in the revelations which add to science and which may be turned to account in commerce and the progress of civilization.