According to Sonnini and Buffon, hippopotamuses only became extinct in the Lower Nile near the Mediterranean as late as 1658. Two hippopotamuses were killed at Damietta in 1600 by an Italian surgeon named Federigo Zeringhi. * * * * * Nearly a hundred years before Cecil John Rhodes was brooding in his studies at Oriel College over the advance of British South Africa toward the equatorial regions, that same college at Oxford was nurturing other dreams of African exploration in the mind of William George Browne, a Londoner by birth (1768), who at seventeen became an undergraduate at Oriel. Browne was fired by reading Bruce’s “Travels,” and a year after those five volumes were published, when he was only twenty-three (1791), he started for Alexandria, which he reached after a month’s journey from England (not a bad record for those days). Egypt proper prior to the descent of the French under Napoleon must have been fairly free from Muhammadan fanaticism and distrust of Europeans in the second half of the eighteenth century. Not a few travellers--French, Italian, and English--were able to circulate in the dominions governed by the Mameluks. Browne first of all visited the oasis of Siwah. He spent a year and a half on this journey, and examined the whole of Egypt proper and the peninsula of Sinai. Being at Assiut in March or April, 1793, he heard of the caravan which, until quite recently, left that place annually to travel across the desert to Darfur. Following the same route, and in a measure attaching himself to the caravan, he reached Darfur after a journey of considerable difficulty. Here he found himself amongst such fanatical Muhammadans that he was practically a prisoner, and it was only by invoking the aid and sympathy of the Turkish authorities in Egypt that he induced the Sultan of Darfur to allow him to return. Even then he was not allowed to carry out his project of striking the White Nile from the direction of Darfur, and thence crossing into Abyssinia. He was obliged to return along the caravan route to Assiut. He then continued his travels in the direction of Syria, and arrived in London in 1798. After publishing an account of his travels, he again left England for the Levant. In 1812 he started for Persia with the intention of exploring Central Asia. Between Tabriz and Teheran his caravan was attacked by robbers, and he was killed. The part of his book which deals with Egypt and Darfur is excellent, much in advance of his age and very “modern” in its accuracy, definiteness, and absence of gushing enthusiasm. Equally remarkable for the age is the soundness of his orthography in spelling local names and in transcribing dialects. Browne’s work still remains an authority on Darfur.