To look on the sources of the Nile was ever a wish and dream. The conquerors of Egypt, at whatever time and of whatever nation, longed to unravel the problem of its fountains. In the days when a settled population extended far into Nubia and a powerful state flourished at Meroë, near the junction of the White and Blue Nile, the tramp of armed hosts in search of the “mythical fountains,” favorite haunt of Jove himself when he wished seclusion, often resounded in the deep African interior. Sesostris, the first king who patronized map making, made attempts to discover these springs. Alexander the Great, Cambyses the Persian, and the Roman Cæsars, were inspired with the same wish. Julius Cæsar said he would give up civil war could he but look on the sources of the Nile. Nero sent out a vast exploring party who told of cataracts and marshes which compelled their return. These expeditions were formidable. They returned empty handed as to science, but generally loaded with spoils of conquest. The idea of a solitary explorer, with his life in his hand and good will toward all in his heart, encountering all the perils and privations of African travel for pure love of knowledge, is wholly a modern conception. Let mention be made here of Ismail Pasha, ex-viceroy of Egypt. To the practices of an oriental despot he added the spirit of a man of modern science. To him, more than to any other man, do we owe a complete solution of the mystery of the Nile. He plunged Egypt into inextricable debt, he ground his people with taxes, but he introduced to them the light of western knowledge, he granted the concessions which built the Suez Canal, he sought out and annexed the sources of the Nile. For twenty years European pioneers and explorers, in his pay or under his protection, worked their way southward, mapping lakes and rivers, founding settlements, capturing slave gangs, until the entire Nile Valley either acknowledges Egypt or is open to commerce and civilization, unless forsooth the recent Soudanese protest, made by the fanatical El Mahdi and his followers, should prove to be more persistent and better sustained than now seems probable.