Spain is meditating a protectorate of Morocco. Messrs. Bolliglia, Mamoli and Pastori, of the “Italian Society for Promoting Commercial Exploration in Africa,” have left Tripoli to examine the elevated plain of Barka and to found trading posts at Bengasi, Derna and Tebreck, and afterwards others on the oasis bordering the road to Uadai and Bornu. The Italian Government has contributed generously to outfit the expedition. The same Society has dispatched M. Demeitri and M. Michieli from Khartoum for the Red Sea, with a caravan of seven hundred camels laden with various kinds of merchandise for trade. The Egyptian Government has sent the learned Rohlfs to the King of Abyssinia to arrange mutual relations on a friendly basis. The Sultan of Zanzibar has engaged the intrepid Thomson to conduct a geographical investigation of the Rovouma. THE SLAVE TRADE.――It is estimated that fifty thousand natives are annually conveyed to the Turkish and Egyptian ports of the Red Sea, where they are disposed of to dealers. The Sultan of Zanzibar has dispatched an armed force of five hundred men, commanded by an officer detailed from the British Army, in the direction of Lake Tanganyika, and the British Government is to establish consuls at Suakin and Khartoum, with authority to travel in Egypt and on the Red Sea, “to heal the open sore of the world.” The French Government is to make earnest efforts and to co-operate with England in all measures having in view the same humane object. The Khedive has appointed Comte Della Salla to the special office of repressing the slave traffic in lower Egypt. It is to be regretted that at the Berlin Congress in 1878, which afforded an excellent opportunity for concerting a treaty on slavery between the Powers of Europe, this good result was rendered impossible by the action of the English representatives. EXPLORATIONS.――In the exploration of Africa the Germans keep the lead, of which almost nothing is known until they appear after an absence of a few years, with a fund of knowledge that is astonishing. Witness, for instance, the apparition of Lenz from a journey from Morocco to Timbuctoo, and thence to Medina and St. Louis. This famous traveler reports passing through towns of from ten to thirty thousand inhabitants, and of having made discoveries which explode the theory of converting the Sahara into an ocean. He states that the most depressed portion of El Juff, the body of the desert, is some five hundred feet above the level of the sea, and that there exist in several oases points which promise to be of great utility for the proposed Sahara railway.