At present there are many obstacles to overcome, of which the superstition of the natives is not the least. There is, however, a project full of promise for reaching this country. By recent surveys it has been ascertained that opposite the Canary Islands, in latitude 28° north, running five hundred miles south-east in the Great Desert, there is a sink two hundred feet below the level of the Atlantic, extending to within one hundred miles of Timbuctoo, the great city of Central Africa. This sink or depression has a width of one hundred and twenty miles, and contains sixty thousand square miles of land. Explorers agree that a channel once connected its north-western extremity with the Atlantic, where it terminated in a sand-bank, which prevented the waters of the ocean from flowing into its bed. Its mouth is formed between perpendicular rocks, and measures about two and a half miles in width, and is blocked by a sand-bar, three hundred yards across, with a height of thirty feet above the sea. All that is needed is to excavate a ship canal three hundred yards long through the sand-bar, and the inland sea will be speedily formed. When this is accomplished the Mendi country and its neighborhood will be a vast island, approachable from many directions, and a belt of civilization will be closed in until the whole area is blessed with peace and abundance. Then “Afric’s sunny fountains” will “roll down their golden sands” into the lap of the older civilizations, and receive in return the riper and richer results of the heaven-born blessings of the Gospel. (5.) It is fitting, furthermore, that we consider the character and condition of the people of this domain. As to their physical proportions, we have reason to believe that back of the malarial belt they are well formed, muscular and endowed with powers of great endurance. The tribes of the interior drive down the inhabitants of the forest range into the lowland, where the law of the survival of the unfittest obtains on account of malaria leaving alive the coarse, muscular men of the coast. Of the mental capacity of these people a good illustration was seen in Barnabas Root, a real heathen, who came to this country and was graduated at a Western college and also at the Chicago Theological Seminary, ranking among the best scholars of his class at both institutions.