the Great Syrtis (Fezzan) crossed the <Greek> (watered strip along the Mediterranean), passed through the <Greek> (the "bush") on the frontier, still famed for lions, and the immeasurably sandy wastes (the Sahara proper, across which caravan lines run). The "band of little black men" can no longer be held fabulous, since Miani and Schweinfurth added the Akya to M. du Chaillu's Obongo. The extensive marshes were the northern limit of the tropical rains, and the "City of Enchanters" is the type of many still existing in inner Africa. The great river flowing from west to east, whose crocodiles showed it to be the Nile, must have been the Niger. The ancients knew middle Ethiopia to be a country watered by lakes and streams: Strabo (xvii. 3) tells us that "some suppose that even the Nile-sources are near the extremities of Mauritania." Hence, too, the Nilides, or Lake of Standing Water in Pliny (v. 10). For the most part they made a great central river traverse the northern continent from west to east, whereas the Arabian geographers of the middle ages, who were followed by the Portuguese, inverted the course. Both may be explained by the lay of the Quorra and the Binúwe, especially the latter; it was chronically confounded with the true Nile, whose want of western influents was not so well known then as now. The generation which has discovered the "Moabite Stone," the ruins of Troy (Schliemann), and the key to the inscriptions of Etruria (Corssen), need not despair of further progress. It has been well remarked that, whereas the course of modern exploration has generally been maritime, the ancients, whose means of navigation were less perfect, preferred travelling by land. We are, doubtless, far better acquainted with the outlines of the African coast, and the immediately maritime region, than the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs. But it is still doubtful whether their information respecting the interior did not surpass ours. Eratosthenes, librarian of Alexandria (B. C. 276-196) expresses correct notions concerning the upper course of the Nile; Marinus of Tyre[FN#13] had the advantage of borrowing from the pilot, Diogenes, who visited the Nile reservoirs of central inter-tropical Africa, and Ptolemy has been justified in certain important points by our latest explorations.