Malarial fever is the one sad certainty which every African traveller must face. For months he may escape, but its finger is upon him, and well for him if he has a friend near when it finally overtakes him. It is preceded for weeks, or even for a month or two, by unaccountable irritability, depression and weariness. On the march with his men he has scarcely started when he sighs for the noon-day rest. Putting it down to mere laziness, he goads himself on by draughts from the water-bottle, and totters forward a mile or two more. Next he finds himself skulking into the forest on the pretext of looking at a specimen, and, when his porters are out of sight, throws himself under a tree in utter limpness and despair. Roused by mere shame, he staggers along the trail, and as he nears the mid-day camp puts on a spurt to conceal his defeat, which finishes him for the rest of the day. This is a good place for specimens he tells the men--the tent may be pitched for the night. This goes on day after day till the crash comes--first cold and pain, then heat and pain, then every kind of pain, and every degree of heat, then delirium, then the life-and-death struggle. He rises, if he does rise, a shadow; and slowly accumulates strength for the next attack, which he knows too well will not disappoint him. No one has ever yet got to the bottom of African fever. Its geographical distribution is still unmapped, but generally it prevails over the whole east and west coasts within the tropical limit, along all the river-courses, on the shores of the inland lakes, and in all low-lying and marshy districts. The higher plateaux, presumably, are comparatively free from it, but in order to reach these, malarious districts of greater or smaller area have to be traversed. There the system becomes saturated with fever, which often develops long after the infected region is left behind. The known facts with regard to African fever are these: First, it is connected in some way with drying-up water and decaying vegetation, though how the germs develop, or what they are, is unknown. Second, natives suffer from fever equally with Europeans, and this more particularly in changing from district to district and from altitude to altitude. Thus, in marching over the Tanganyika plateau, four or five of my native carriers were down with fever, although their homes were only two or three hundred miles off, before I had even a touch of it. Third, quinine is the great and almost the sole remedy; and, fourth, no European ever escapes it.