The climate of Zanzibar Island is better than that of the adjacent continent. Here many white residents have escaped severe fever; but upon the coast the disastrous fate of Captain Owen’s surveyors, the loss of life on board our cruisers, and the many deaths of the ‘Mombas Mission,’ even though, finding the sea-board dangerous, they built houses on the hills which lead to the mountain region of Usumbara, prove that malaria is as active in eastern as in western Africa. Colonel Hamerton once visited the Pangani river during the month of August: of his 19 men, three died, and all but one suffered severely. Perhaps we should not find a similar mortality in the present day, when the lancet has been laid aside for the preventive treatment by quinine and tonics. It has, however, been asserted that the prophylactic use of the alkaloid, which was such a success in western Africa, did not prove equally valuable on the eastern coast. Yet Zanzibar, with its double seasons and its uniformly heated and humid atmosphere, accords ill, even where healthiest, with the irritable temperament of northern races. Here, contrary to the rule of Madagascar, the lowlands over which the fresh sea-breeze plays are the only parts where the white stranger can land and live; the interior is non habitabilis æstu. Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, called upon in March, 1844, by Sir George Arthur, governor of Bombay, to report upon the island, wrote in September of the same year, ‘The climate of the [insular] coast is not unhealthy for Europeans, but it is impossible for white men to live in the interior of the island, the vegetation being rank and appearing always to be going on; and generally fever contracted in the interior is fatal to Europeans.’ Colonel Sykes (loco cit.) questions this assertion as being ‘contrary to all other testimony.’ Every traveller, however, knows it to be correct. As in the lovely climates of the Congo River and the South Sea Islands, corporal lassitude leads to indolence, languor, and decline of mental energy, which can be recovered only by the bracing influence of the northern winter. Many new arrivals complain of depressing insomnia, with alternations of lethargic sleep: I never enjoyed at Zanzibar the light refreshing rest of the desert. Yet the island is a favourable place for the young African traveller to undergo the inevitable ‘seasoning fever’, which upon the coast or in the interior might prove fatal. The highlands, or the borders of the great central basin, are tolerably healthy, but an invalid would find no comforts there—hardly a waterproof roof. He should not, however, risk after recovery a second attack, but at once push on to his goal; otherwise he will expend in preparation the strength and bottom required to carry out his explorations. With a fresh, sound constitution, he may work hard for three years, and even if driven home by ill health he may return in comparative safety within a reasonable time.