Samuel White Baker was born in London on the 8th June, 1821, and was the second and eventually eldest son of Mr. Samuel Baker, a city merchant, who possessed large properties and sugar plantations in Jamaica and Mauritius. Samuel Baker, the elder, at one time maintained a small fleet of sailing vessels. He also became one of the first Directors of the Great Western Railway. His family and grandfather were mainly settled at Bristol, and were much connected with the navy in the eighteenth century. Further back still the Bakers were members of Parliament and Court officials. They came originally from London, then became a Kentish family, then moved to Dorsetshire, then to Bristol, and finally back again to London. Samuel Baker, the younger, was a typical English boy. His biographer, Mr. Douglas Murray, describes him as having been “of the Saxon type; a noble-looking boy, of very fair complexion, light hair, and fearless blue eyes.” He was “enterprising, mischievous, for ever getting into scrapes, and leading others into them; but he was never known to tell a lie or do a mean thing.” His career was very nearly brought to a premature close when he was twelve years old by an attempt to make fireworks. He ignited a small heap of gunpowder on the kitchen table, and caused a terrible explosion, which blew him to the far end of the room and burnt his arm severely. He hated school, and received most of his education from a private tutor and by a residence at Frankfurt in Germany. His father attempted to put him in his London office; and this work, though excessively irksome, was endured for a time, as he had early fallen in love with the daughter of a Gloucestershire rector, whom he married when he was only twenty-two. Soon after his marriage he went out to Mauritius with his wife, to attempt the management of his father’s estates in that island. But he was restless and dissatisfied with this career; moreover, his three children, born in three years, all died. He therefore started for Ceylon, to which island he was attracted by the stories of big-game shooting. His interest was excited in the splendid mountain region of the interior of Ceylon, which presents considerable areas for European occupations between six thousand and eight thousand feet in altitude. Here for nine years he worked at founding an English settlement of planters, which exists to this day in a flourishing condition, some of the land-owners being members of the Baker family. But his wife, who bore him many children, suffered greatly in health. In 1855 he returned to England, and wrote a book on Ceylon. At the end of that year his wife died, and Baker, after leaving his young children to be brought up in England, started for Constantinople, which he reached at the close of the Crimean War. His idea was to travel in Circassia, and see what advance in that direction Russia was making towards India; but he spent several years in a rather objectless