It is an old remark that Africa, the continent which became an island by the union of the twin seas in the year of grace 1869, despite her exuberant wealth and her wonderful powers of reproduction, is badly made—a trunk without limbs, a monotonous mass of painful symmetry, wanting opposition and contrast, like the uniform dark complexion of her sons and of her fauna—a solid body, like her own cocoa-nut, hard to penetrate from without, and soft within; an ‘individual of the earth,’ self-isolated by its savagery from the rest of the world. This is especially true of intertropical Africa. The western coast was, until the last four centuries, cut off from intercourse with mankind by the storm-lashed waters of the northern approach; and to the present day the unbroken seaboard, so scanty in good harbours, and the dangerous bars and bores which defend the deadly river mouths, render it the least progressive part of the old world. The more fortunate north-eastern and subtropical shores were enabled by their vast crévasse, the Red and riverless Sea, to communicate with Western Asia, whilst the rich productions, gold and ivory, tortoise- shell and ambergris, the hot sensuous climate—which even now induces the northern sailor to ship in the fatal West African squadron—and the amene scenery of the equatorial regions, invited, during pre-historic ages, merchants, and even immigrants, from rugged Persia and sterile Arabia. Between the two upper coasts, eastern and western, there is, as might be expected, great similarity of grim aspect. The northern seaboards offer, for the space of a thousand miles, the same horrid aspect; deceitful roadsteads and dangerous anchorages, forbidding lines of chalky cliff and barren brown sandstone bluff; flat strands and white downs, hazed over by the spray of desert sand; and lowlands backed by maritime sub- ranges, masses of bald hill and naked mountains, streaked with dry wadis and water-courses, that bear scatters of dates and thorns, and which support miserable villages of tents or huts. The fierce and wandering tribes, Berber, Arab, and Arabo-African—an especially ‘crooked and perverse generation,’—are equally dangerous to the land traveller and to the shipwrecked mariner. As sterile and unlovely for the same cause—the absence of tropical rains—are the southern regions of the great Nineteenth Century Island. Good harbours are even rarer than in the north, and the seas about the Cape of Hope, sweeping up unbroken from the South Pole, are yet more perilous. The highlands fringing the southern and eastern coasts arrest the humid winds, and are capable of supporting an extensive population; but the interior and the western coast, being lowlands, are wild and barren. The South African or Kafir family, which has overrun this soil, is still for the most part in the nomade state, and its ‘evident destiny’ is to disappear before the European colonist.