Burton returned to England in 1859, somewhat chagrined to hear of the enthusiasm with which Speke’s discovery of the Victoria Nyanza had been received,--an enthusiasm which to some extent had put the revelation of Lake Tanganyika in the shade. Burton nevertheless was awarded, in 1860, the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and in returning thanks for this honour, he uttered a handsome acknowledgment of Speke’s services as surveyor on this expedition to the great lakes. But the two men were evidently on bad terms, and though the fault of their disaccord may have lain with Burton’s conduct, the world knew of it first through the writings of Speke in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” and later (in 1864) in the republication of these Blackwood articles with additions under the title of “What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.” In these works Speke makes certain stinging references to Burton. So far as an impartial verdict can be arrived at, Speke in all probability spoke the truth; but he was perhaps unduly hard on his companion, for whom he had evidently a great personal dislike and some degree of contempt. In some respects Speke’s own education had been defective (at least, we are told that he was so much of a truant as to receive but little schooling before going to India). He may, therefore, have been unable to appreciate to the full Burton’s undoubted talents. Yet again, in reading Speke’s books it would occur to no one to say that he was deficient in education. He had become an admirable geographer, a keen naturalist; and whether his writing was or was not without grace of style, it was certainly pithy and to the point. His great book, the “Discovery of the Source of the Nile,” is good reading all through, and strikes one who, like the present writer, has been over much of the same ground, as being singularly truthful. It is as good a book as any that Burton himself ever wrote on Africa, not excepting even the excellent “Lake Regions.” Speke was a fine figure of a man,--tall and handsome in an English style, with blue eyes and a brown beard. There is no doubt that he impressed the natives favourably wherever he went as being a man and a gentleman. Yet there was a little hardness in his disposition, something pitiless in his criticisms of Burton. Burton’s own attacks on Speke scarcely appeared in a public form until four years after Speke had returned to Africa. They were angry, and somewhat clumsy, but not so incisive as Speke’s criticisms of Burton. Burton’s chief revenge lay in endeavouring for many years to prove that Speke had made no very great discovery; that his Victoria Nyanza was not the greatest lake in Africa and the main source of the Nile, but a network of swamps and lakelets. Burton hailed with delight Sir Samuel Baker’s description of the Albert Nyanza as being the ultimate origin of the White Nile. To meet this view he, against his own convictions, tried to make the