In making the above suggestions we would not be understood to reflect upon the Executive Committee as lacking proper care or enterprise in the pursuance of the African work. We are aware of their past limitations, the sudden exigencies of the civil war, the vast responsibilities thrown upon them by the emancipation of the slaves, and that the immediate sympathies of the Christian public on which the Association relies for its support have demanded prime attention to the home work; but now that the logic of events more clearly defines the important relations of the home work to the foreign, the appeal should be strongly made for such an increase of contributions as shall warrant the Association to push its work abroad with fresh vigor. J. W. HARDING, _Chairman_. * * * * * ADDRESS OF REV. J. W. HARDING. The romance of African exploration is rapidly passing by. We must, in this missionary work, take into account fully the great and peculiar difficulties in the way—difficulties beginning with the physical geography of that continent, its lack of bays and harbors, its generally unnavigable rivers, choked by sand-bars, impeded by rapids and cataracts and masses of floating soil; and then the deadly climate, the rank and putrescent vegetation, the fetid odors poisoning the air. Will you plunge with me for a few minutes into the African forest, starting with the latest travelers, Keith Johnston, son of the great geographer, and Joseph Thompson, a young man of twenty, a graduate of Edinburgh University and a good botanist and geologist? They plunge into that African forest opposite Zanzibar, following a path only eighteen inches wide, for all means of conveyance by beasts of burden—horses, mules, camels, elephants—have failed in that country, and travelers are forced back upon the narrow foot-paths. The grass, cane-like, interwoven with thorny creepers, is from ten to twenty feet high. They have to cut their way with hatchets and cutlasses, it is so soon choked by the rank growth. They are drenched with the dew for the first two hours through and through; then they are scorched by the sun. By and by comes a pouring shower and they are drenched again. At night they lie down in their little shelter tents, breathing the steamy, stuffy, poisoned air; and before they get 200 miles, Joseph Thompson, the young man of twenty, buries under a mangrove tree his friend Keith Johnston. He was only thirty-four, an athletic fellow, proud of his English training, of a splendid constitution. But that is a deadly climate. Young Thompson staggers along, often falling in his tracks. His men have to lift him up and he has to hold on to their belts; but, after fourteen months and fifteen hundred miles of travel, only losing one man, no plundering, no desertions, not a shot fired offensive or defensive, not a drop of blood shed, though