(12,000 odd feet) in Morocco was the highest known peak in Africa. Doubtless next year, in a later edition, the claims of Kilima-njaro will be considered, and just as these receive a tardy recognition, some adventurous traveller will bring to our knowledge another African Alp of mightier proportions and loftier summit destined to oust from his proud position the object of my recent journey, who, displaced from the homage of the eager geographer, must be content to linger still a few years longer in possession of the vague respect of the British schoolboy. Although the mass of Kilima-njaro rises rather abruptly from a fairly level plain, it is hardly to be called isolated, and indeed it may be said that an almost continuous chain of mountain-ranges and independent peaks connect it with Abyssinia on the north, Natal on the south, and, possibly, also with the Cameroons on the west. Judged by the flora which clothes its higher regions, it may be almost regarded as the common meeting-ground of many forms peculiarly characteristic of these three widely separated mountain-districts. To ascertain the relationships of the fauna and flora of Kilima-njaro, two learned societies—the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society—at the instigation, I believe, of Mr. Sclater, the Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, delegated certain of their members to form a Kilima-njaro Expedition Committee, and funds to the extent of 1000_l._ were placed at their disposal. The great height attained by Kilima-njaro, and the fact that this snow-clad mountain-mass lies in the Equatorial zone, and exhibits an extraordinary range of climates on its broad slopes, were thought sufficient causes to give rise to or explain many curious features in its fauna and flora; moreover, a like condition of things—perpetual snow under the Equator—was only to be met with elsewhere in Central and South America, no mountains in other parts of the tropics reaching to the snow-line. In all cases lofty ranges lying in little-known regions are interesting to students of natural history. Isolated mountains of great height are often like oceanic islands, and serve as a refuge and a last abiding-place for low types or peculiar forms, which in larger and more densely-populated areas find the competition too keen, and are extinguished in the struggle for life. Or, it may be, some species or genus, originally of a generalized type, becomes by various circumstances the inhabitant of an alpine range or a sea-girt island, and being thus removed and protected from the natural checks to its peculiar development offered by the contemporaneous evolution of its fellows, may, as it were, run riot in the absence of rivalry, and assume very eccentric and singular forms. Thus we can imagine that a pigeon something like the modern didunculus of the South Sea Islands once arrived in Mauritius, having perhaps hitherto had to contend with the