The energetic work undertaken by Sir Samuel Baker of suppressing the slave-trade in the Equatorial Province of the Egyptian Sudan was carried much further by the celebrated Charles Gordon, who was destined to die at Khartum under circumstances conferring on him lasting fame. Gordon Pasha (as he subsequently became) had, as it is hardly necessary to state, been an engineer officer. It was thought that his appointment to the supreme government of the Egyptian Sudan (an appointment which Baker had not held, since he worked with an Egyptian Governor-General at Khartum) would--as it did--materially assist the improvement of communications. Gordon made an interesting survey of the country between Suakin and Berber on the Nile, and together with Lieutenants Watson and Chippendall mapped the main Nile from Khartum to Gondokoro and Lake Albert. He also caused the circumnavigation of that lake to be effected. Soon after Gordon had taken up the work begun by Sir Samuel Baker, a curious theory had been started concerning Lake Albert Nyanza. In those days, when so much personal feeling was very naturally imported into Nile exploration, and one great explorer vied with another, theories were often started by A to minimise the work of B or to exaggerate the results of A’s own discoveries. It has been already recounted how Burton, piqued by Speke’s great discovery of the Victoria Nyanza, which might have fallen to Burton’s own lot had he been less crippled with fever, subsequently strove to prove the non-existence of that lake as a continuous sheet of water. Speke in the most wonderful manner had not only discovered the Victoria Nyanza, but had, by the collection of native information and the deductions he drew therefrom, made, on the whole, a remarkably accurate forecast of the Nile system in the region of the equatorial lakes. He had put Lake Albert on the map, merely from report, in a shape and position closely in accordance with actuality. Not, however, being able to visit this lake himself, he had handed the task over to Sir Samuel Baker, who had discovered the Albert Nyanza, but had not been able to ascertain its area and shape. Both Speke and Baker, however, assumed that the Victoria Nile entered Lake Albert, and quitted that lake as the main stream of the White Nile. Neither explorer, however, nor most that came after them, could state positively that they had mapped the Victoria Nile along its whole course from the Ripon Falls to Lake Albert, nor had they traced the course of the Nile from Lake Albert northward to Gondokoro. Therefore in the early seventies some theorist had started the ingenious idea that Lake Albert belonged either to the system of the Congo or the Shari, and that its waters drained away by an unknown river at the south end, or else by an outlet to the north, which was not the Nile, as generally assumed, but a river which flowed westward to the unknown. The discovery about this time of Lake Kioga further confused notions