Miss Kingsley--the niece of the well-known writer and naturalist, Charles Kingsley--exhibited much of her uncle's literary ability and love of nature. So complete was her intellectual grasp of the most difficult problems, and so rare was her overflowing sympathy for all of God's creatures, that she was well described as possessing "the brain of a man and the heart of a woman." In order to get at first-hand information that was necessary to complete a work which her father, George Kingsley, had, owing to his premature death, left unfinished, she determined to visit that part of West Africa "where all authorities agreed that the Africans were at their wildest and worst." Accompanied only by the natives, she travelled among cannibals, pushed her way through mangrove swamps and pestilential morasses. She spent months in a canoe exploring the territory watered by the Calabar and Ogowe rivers, often in imminent peril of death from wild animals or wilder men. When not studying the manners and customs of the native tribes, she was hunting fishes and reptiles in streams and quagmires and collecting insects in the weird, grim twilight of the equatorial forest with its inextricable tangle of creepers, its great hanging tapestries of vines and flowers, its myriads of bush-ropes, suspended from the summits of tall buttressed trees, "some as straight as plumb lines, others coiled round and intertwined among each other until one could fancy one was looking on some mighty battle between armies of gigantic serpents that had been arrested at its height by some mighty spell." The results of Miss Kingsley's wanderings in this dark and uncanny wilderness and among the savage tribes visited by her were her two instructive volumes entitled _Travels in West Africa_ and _West African Studies_. In addition to these two works from her pen there are deposited in the British Museum an interesting collection of insects, fishes and reptiles--many of them new species and some of them named in her honor--which testifies to her activity as a collector and her enthusiasm as a naturalist. Her brilliant and useful career was cut short in Cape Colony, whither she had gone as an army nurse during the Boer war. In view of her achievements one is not surprised to learn that her countrymen regarded her premature taking-off as a national misfortune. The noblest monument to her memory is "The Mary Kingsley Society of West Africa," whose object is to carry on, as far as may be, the beneficent work she began on the West African coast and to accomplish for English rule in this part of the world what the "Royal Asiatic Society" has achieved for British administration in India. Madame Coudreau is designated in _Qui Etes-Vous_--the French Who's Who--as an _exploratrice_. This well characterizes her; for, if not the first woman explorer by profession, she is certainly the most energetic and successful.