ultimately would prove economical by obviating the necessity of parting with more valuable articles. The break-down of the last chronometer disheartened us for a time. Presently when our brains, addled by sun and sickness, had recovered tone by a return to the Usagara sanitarium, we remembered a rough and ready succedaneum for instruments. I need scarcely tell the reader that, unhappily for travellers, the only means of ascertaining the longitude of a place is by finding the difference between the local and Greenwich times, and that this difference of time with certain corrections is converted into distance of space. We split a 4 oz. rifle-ball, inserted into it a string measuring 39 inches from the point of suspension to the centre of the weight, and fixed it by hammering the halves together. The loose end of the cord was attached to a three-edged file as a pivot, and this was lashed firmly to the branch of a tree sheltered as much as possible from the wind. Local time was ascertained with a sextant by taking the altitude of a star or a planet; Greenwich time by a distance between the star or planet and the moon, and the vibrations of our rude pendulum did all that a watch could do, by registering the seconds that elapsed between the several observations. I am somewhat presuming upon the subject, but perhaps it may here be better to chronicle the accidents which happened to the rest of our instruments. We had two Schmalcalder’s compasses (H. Barron & Co., 26, Oxenden Street), which, when the paste-board faces had been acclimatized and no longer curled up against their glasses, did good service; one of them was trodden upon by my companion, the other by a sailor during a cruise on the lake. We returned with a single instrument, the gift of my old friend Lieut.-General Monteith; it had surveyed Persia, and outlasting two long excursions into Eastern Africa, it still outlives and probably will outlive many of the showy articles now supplied by the trade. Finally, a ship’s compass, mounted in gimbals for boat-work and indented for upon the Engineer’s Stores, Bombay, soon became lumber, its oscillations were too sluggish to be useful.