At the end of the 15th century came the Portuguese explorers, with Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy, in their hands, and followed by a multitude of soldiers, merchants, and missionaries, who invested the intertropical maritime regions of Africa, east and west. The first enthusiasm, however, soon passed away. The Portuguese were supplanted by the Dutch, by the English, and by the French; whilst Ptolemy and the Periplus were ousted by Pigafetta, Dapper, and other false improvers of their doctrines. The Ptolemeian Lakes were marched about and counter-marched in every possible way. The ‘Mountain of the Moon,’ prolonged across Africa under the name Jebel Kumri, really became ‘Lunatic Mountains.’ The change from good to bad geography is well illustrated by two charts published in 1860, by H. E. the Conde de Lavradio. The first is the fac- simile of a map in the British Museum, by Diogo Homem, in 1558. It makes the Nile spring from two great reservoirs. But the second, bearing the name of Antonio Sances (1623), already reduces these lakes to one central Caspian, which sends forth the Nile, the Congo, and the Zambeze, and which, greatly shrunken, still deforms our maps under the name of Marave. Similarly, the ‘Complete System of Geography,’ by Emanuel Bowen (1747), places the Zambre Lake in S. lat. 4°-11°, the ‘centre from which proceed all the rivers in this part of Africa,’ including the Nile. How popular the subject continued to be may be guessed from the fact that Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), cast his African reading into a favourite form with him, the ‘Adventures of Captain Singleton.’ He lands his hero about March, 1701, a little south of Cape Delgado, causes him to cross several seas and rivers, the latter often flowing northwards, and after a year’s wandering, brings him out at the Dutch settlements on the Gold Coast. Upon the general question of modern Nile literature the curious reader will consult the well-studied writings of M. Vivien de Saint-Martin. The valuable paper ‘On the Knowledge the Ancients possessed of the Sources of the Nile,’ by my friend W. S. W. Vaux (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. viii., New Series), treats of exploration up the river, beginning from the Ionian colony, established in the upper river by Psammetichus (circa A.C. 600), and extending to the present day. The learned article by Mr John Hogg, ‘On some old Maps of Africa, in which certain of the Central and Equatorial Lakes are laid down in nearly their true positions,’[13] (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. viii.), supplies a compendium of old cartography.