one of the rivers named by Captain Wellby “Ruzi.” At the same time Dr. Donaldson-Smith, who crossed this region in 1900, does not appear to have encountered running water where the junction of the Ruzi and the Neubari should have taken place. Probably the two Ruzis discovered by Captain Wellby are two different streams, one of which flows northwestward into the Nile and the other into the northwest corner of Lake Rudolf. The countries to the south of Akobo and northwest of Lake Rudolf are described by the few travellers who have visited them as being a region of appalling drought. [Illustration: GORGE OF THE RIVER BARO (UPPER SOBAT).] Mr. Weld Blundell had succeeded the Bonchamps-Michel expedition as an explorer of the Blue Nile, and of its interesting southern affluent, the Didessa. Mr. Blundell made several interesting changes in the delineation of the course of the Blue Nile westward of Gojam. Blundell’s work was succeeded by the remarkable surveys of Major C. W. Gwynn and Lieutenant L. C. Jackson, who contributed a map of the Blue Nile from Roseires up stream to the Gubba country, on the frontiers of Abyssinia. They also threw a little more light on the course of the Didessa and Yabus affluents of the Blue Nile, and the upper waters of the Rahad, which also flows (somewhat intermittently) into the Blue Nile. From the Rahad they crossed the tiny stretch of mountainous country (Galabat) to the Atbara. Here they showed that only a distance of about five miles of mountains separates the affluents of the Atbara from the affluents of the Rahad, which is a tributary of the Blue Nile. But for this intervening ridge of five miles in breadth, the systems of the Atbara and the Blue Nile would (as the ancients and Arabs formerly believed) have turned the whole country of Sennar into a huge island, in which form it was represented by most travellers down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Major Gwynn also explored the head-waters of the river Garre, which is the northernmost affluent of the Baro-Sobat, and also the Pibor. As to the country between the Baro or the main upper Sobat and the Pibor, Major Gwynn describes it as “a dried-up marsh covered with a thick choking layer of black ash resulting from the burning of the grass.” The Nuers, one of the eastern tribes of the Nilotic Negroes, he describes as a wonderfully fine race physically, averaging nearly six feet in height. Of the work of the earliest European pioneer in western Galaland Major Gwynn gives a generous estimate:--