“More time has been spent in the exploration than I ever anticipated. Many a weary foot I trod ere I got a clear idea of the drainage of the great Nile valley. The most intelligent natives and traders thought that all the rivers of the upper part of that valley flowed into Tanganyika. But the barometers told me that to do so the water must flow up hill. The great rivers and the great lakes all make their waters converge into the deep trough of the valley, which is a full inch of the barometer lower than the Upper Tanganyika. “Let me explain, but in no boastful style, the mistakes of others who have bravely striven to solve the ancient problem, and it will be seen that I have cogent reasons for following the painful, plodding investigation to its conclusion. Poor Speke’s mistake was a foregone conclusion. When he discovered the Victoria Nyansa he at once jumped to the conclusion that therein lay the sources of the river of Egypt, ‘20,000 square miles of water,’ confused by sheer immensity. Ptolemy’s small lake, Coloc, is a more correct representation of the actual size of that one of three or four lakes which alone sends its outflow to the north. Its name is Okara. Lake Kavirondo is three days distant from it, but connected by a narrow arm. Lake Naibash, or Neibash, is four days from Kavirondo. Baringo is ten days distant, and discharges by a river, the Nagardabash, to the northeast. “These three or four lakes, which have been described by several intelligent Suaheli, who have lived for many years on their shores, were run into one huge Victoria Nyanza. But no sooner did Speke and Grant turn their faces to this lake, to prove that it contained the Nile fountains, than they turned their backs to the springs of the river of Egypt, which are between four hundred and five hundred miles south of the most southerly portion of the Victoria Lake. Every step of their heroic and really splendid achievement of following the river down took them further and further from the sources they sought. But for the devotion to the foregone conclusion the sight of the little ‘White Nile,’ as unable to account for the great river, they must have turned off to the west down into the deep trough of the great valley, and there found lacustrine rivers amply sufficient to account for the Nile and all its phenomena. “But all that can in modern times and in common modesty be fairly claimed is the re-discovery of what had sunk into oblivion, like the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phœnician admirals of one of the Pharaohs about B. C. 600. He was not believed because he reported that in passing round Libya he had the sun on his right hand. This, to us who have gone round the Cape from east to west, stamps his tale as genuine. The predecessors of Ptolemy probably gained their information from men who visited this very region, for in the second century of our era he gave in substance what we now find to be genuine geography.