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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



chant. He had shown, too, that the African, with all his faults, was 

 open to the influence of reason, truth, and kindness, that he was capable 

 of improvement, and often eager for it : while all that he wrote of such 

 chiefs as Sechele and Sebituane had corroborated the opinion of every 

 unprejudiced observer that the country could produce men of a far 

 higher stamp than was generally believed. 



And now he might have rested. Most men would ; but not Living- 

 stone. Feeling more than ever, after his experience on the Zambesi, 

 the enormous evils of the slave-trade which prevails along its banks; 

 feeling, too, that the best corrective was to go with commerce and 

 civilization as the handmaids of religion, he endeavored, by public 

 speeches at most of our principal places, to increase the interest in the 

 country his return had excited. At Manchester and Liverpool a strong 

 feeling was aroused among the mercantile and cotton-manufacturing 

 communities ; and on the side of religion the universities embraced 

 his cause. Perhaps he never created a deeper impression than at 

 Cambridge, where he concluded a telling speech in the Senate-House, 

 before the leading members of the university, in these words : " I know 

 that, in a few years, I shall be cut off in that country which is now 

 open. Do not let it be shut again ! I go back to Africa to try to 

 make open a path for commerce and Christianity ; do you carry out 

 the work which I have begun. I leave it with you ! " 



There was no resisting such an appeal. It went abroad, and Eng- 

 lishmen were stirred. And they were stirred to a depth that impelled 

 them to come forward, as they heard the man and felt what he was. 

 The Government, under Lord Palmerston, made a liberal grant of 

 money, and furnished him besides with a small steamer to aid him in 

 his further researches. To give him influence with the Portuguese, he 

 was appointed H. B. M. consul at Quelimane. An expedition was 

 formed, composed of picked men, who, as well as assisting Livingstone 

 in the direct objects of his undertaking, were to examine and report 

 on scientific matters. This object, as concisely stated in Livingstone's 

 second book, was " to explore the Zambesi, its mouths and tributaries, 

 with a view to their being used as highways for commerce and Chris- 

 tianity to pass into the vast interior of Africa." The expedition left 

 England in H. M. S. Pearl, on March 10, 1858 ; and in the following 

 May the little steamer Ma-Robert Mrs. Livingstone's Makololo name 

 was put together and launched in the Kongone mouth of the Zam- 

 besi. 



But, while this was all doing, the universities did not forget Dr. 

 Livingstone's legacy. Oxford, in addition to the Glasgow M. D., 

 recently conferred, had given him the honorary degree of D. C. L. ; but 

 she showed much more how she appreciated his merits by uniting with 

 the other universities to promote the religious objects he had in view. 

 His first work in the Ma-Robert was to ascend the Shire, and discover 

 a beautiful region along its banks to the eastward, which he strongly 



