cclii GENERAL SUMMARY OF SCIENTIFIC AND 



to a proposition of this nature which was receiving some at- 

 tention at the hands of the French engineers in Algeria. A 

 plan, in its general features analogous to this last, was lately- 

 brought out and urged by Mr. Donald Mackenzie. The fol- 

 lowing is a brief synopsis of the arguments urged in its behalf: 

 The Sahara is one of the greatest barriers to intercourse with 

 the interior of the African continent; but, it is urged, a greater 

 portion of this vast area, which was until a comparatively 

 recent period the bed of an inland sea, may without very 

 great difficulty be again restored to that condition, and be 

 the means of distributing over the little known and to some 

 extent wholly unexplored interior the produce and civiliza- 

 tion of Europe and America. In the interest of this project 

 several meetings have lately been held in London, at which 

 Mr. Mackenzie presented his plans. "Although Africa," he 

 said, " has an area of nearly a quarter of the entire land of 

 the globe, it presents greater obstacles to human enterprise 

 than any other part of the earth's surface, and thus, with im- 

 mense natural wealth above ground and below, it is a lost 

 continent, banished, as it were, from intercourse with the 

 civilized parts of the world." His plan is to open a direct 

 commercial highway from a point opposite the Canary Isl- 

 ands to the northern bend of the Niger at Timbuctoo, a dis- 

 tance of 800 miles, by removing a belt of sand and admitting 

 the waters of the Atlantic Ocean to a vast depression in the 

 Great Desert, having an area of 126,000 square miles. Tim- 

 buctoo would thus become a seaport about 2000 miles from 

 England, and North Central Africa would be brought within 

 reach of the harbors of Europe. However extravagant the 

 foregoing proposition may appear, the alternative proposal 

 to make a road, perhaps ultimately a railroad, along the de- 

 pression of that ancient sea-bottom which extends from Cape 

 Juby to the negro metropolis, seems to be a feasible and use- 

 ful project. The promontory named faces the Canaries, and 

 is consequently close to the southern provinces of Barbary. 

 A diagonal line drawn thence to Timbuctoo, 900 miles dis- 

 tant, crosses the western portion of the Sahara, but the route 

 leads through a comparatively low country, with convenient 

 resting-stations and watering-places. From Timbuctoo the 

 Niger is navigable for over a thousand miles. At present 

 there is a caravan trade between Timbuctoo and Morocco 



