Ibrahim had evidently amused himself during his journeys into slave districts by examining the characters of the very different people with whom he came in contact, and the striking contrasts he observed had led his attentive mind to the consideration of the probable causes for the anomalies he witnessed of the black Shankalli, the red Amhara, and the yellow Gonga, all inhabiting a plateau of limited extent. In the course of his long life having traversed in different directions the whole of the table land from Enarea to Gondah, he had been enabled by comparison and re-observation to check and correct himself upon many points which would otherwise have been very obscure. It was not unusual for him to repeat to me instances of such errors that he had at first fallen into, but which he was subsequently enabled to correct by other opportunities of observation. His ideas upon ethnology were also exceedingly interesting and curious, and I am convinced myself that many conclusions he had arrived at on this subject are correct, for by comparing my book-acquired information with the remarkable knowledge he had collected from facts, I could confirm many of the singular truths that seemed to have enlightened his mind, and which contributed greatly to my own progress in that science. My aged instructor would frequently draw upon the earth floor of my residence a rude diagram of the elevated plateau of Abyssinia, which was supposed for our purposes to extend to the parallel of Massoah in the north, and to that of Zanzibar in the south. East and west its extent was represented to be about half this distance. In a large depression in the eastern border, the sources of the river Hawash were represented to be, and opposite, upon the west, was a similar indentation, where the waters of the various rivers that drain this table land fall from above to join the Nile below. Abyssinia, in fact, stands prominently upon the low land around it, like an island in a dried-up sea, and it is this which has given occasion for the Abyssinians to compare their country with the orange red flower of the Soof, (_Carthamus tinctorius_,)[6] the compound corolla surrounded by sharp thorns, which are supposed aptly enough to represent the barbarous Galla tribes that beset Abyssinia on every side. In this delineation of Abyssinia by Ibrahim I first observed the discrepancy between the present received opinions of our geographers, that that country is connected on the south with a supposed extensive table land in the interior of Africa, and that which is entertained by the natives themselves, of the well defined and distinctly marked isolated plateau they inhabit.