The great and persistent efforts to find out the source of the Nile have led explorers to push their theories to an absurd extent. Because Herodotus made the Nile to rise in some large springs, they seem to think they must find something back and beyond a great lake as its source. Now, when a river flows right on through one lake after another, making lakes as the formation of the ground allows, it of course maintains its integrity and oneness. In this case there is but one main stream and as long as the lakes are the mere spreading out of that stream on low, flat lands, it must remain the same. But when you come to great reservoirs like the Albert and Victoria Nyanza and the Tanganika--into which a hundred streams, and perhaps twice that number of springs, flow--to go beyond such reservoirs to find the head of the stream is bringing geography down to a fine point. The outlet is plain--you have traced the river up till you see it roaring from its great feeder. This is very satisfactory, and should end all research after the source of the stream. But to insist on taking measurements of a dozen different rivers that flow into a lake a thousand miles in circumference, to find which is a mile longest or ten feet deepest, and thus determine the source of the outlet, is preposterous. A lake covering twenty-two thousand square miles, fed by a hundred rivers, is a reservoir of itself, and not an expansion of any one river. One might as well try to prove which is the greatest source or feeder of the Atlantic Ocean--the Amazon, Mississippi or Congo. Thus we find Stanley, when he struck the Shimeeyu in Speke Gulf, declaring he had found the extreme southern source of the Nile; and now, when exploring another river of a larger volume on another side of the lake, he changes his mind and thinks he has made a great discovery in ascertaining at last the true source of the river. He found it over fifty feet deep, which showed what a volume of water it poured into the Victoria Nyanza. Descending it again, he entered another lake some thirteen miles long by eight wide. Exploring this, he was driven back by the natives when he attempted to land, who hailed him with shrill shouts and wild war-cries. The Kagera, through its entire length, maintains almost the same depth and volume. [Illustration: HOT SPRINGS OF MTAGATA.]