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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



visible. Schweinfurth speaks with admiration of 

 the peculiar shape and size of the canoes that he 

 saw on the Uelle, which curiously correspond with 

 those seen by Stanley on the Aruwimi. Schwein- 

 furth says: 



"They were hewed out of a single trunk of 

 a tree, and, alike in shape and solidity, were su- 

 perior to what we had hitherto seen. Some of 

 tueni were not less than thirty feet long and four 

 feet broad, and sufficiently spacious to convey both 

 horses and bullocks. So ample are their dimen- 

 sions that there is no risk of their being upset, 

 nor did they lurch in the least degree as we got 

 into them. They were made with both ends run- 

 ning horizontally out into a beak, and the border- 

 lines were ornamented with carved figures. 



" I had seen the teak canoes of the Red Sea, 

 which are called ' hoory ' in Arabic, and are of 

 a build imported from India, and many of the 

 canoes which are in use at Saakim and Djidda; 

 but none of these were comparable, either with 

 respect to size or elegance, with the canoes of the 

 Monbuttoo." 



Mr. Stanley speaks of similar canoes at the 

 mouth of the Aruwimi, which he places some 250 

 miles to the southwest of Schweinfurth's position, 

 the river itself being obviously either the Uelle or 

 a larger stream to which the latter is an affluent, 

 or at least a river draining the same country 

 and having similar characteristics to those which 

 Schweinfurth has so ably described. Mr. Stan- 

 ley's words are as follows : 



"Down the natives came, fast and furious, but 

 in magnificent style. Everything about them was 

 superb. Their canoes were enormous things, one 

 especially, a monster of eighty paddlers, forty on a 

 side, with paddles eight feet long, spear-headed, 

 and really pointed with iron blades— for close 

 quarters, I presume. The top of each paddle- 

 shaft was adorned with an ivory ball. The chiefs 

 pranced up and down a planking that ran from 

 stem to stern. On a platform near the bow were 

 ten choice young fellows, swaying their long spears 

 at the ready. In the stern of this great war-canoe 

 stood eight steersmen, guiding her toward us. 

 There were about twenty— three-fourths of her 

 size— also fine-looking ; but none made qnite such 

 an imposing show. At a rough guess there must 

 have been from 1,500 to 2,000 savages within these 

 fifty-four canoes." 



Another point of resemblance between the 

 characteristics of Schweinfurth's country and 

 those at the mouth of the Aruwimi are the dwarf 

 inhabitants. We find the words "Region of 

 dwarfs " near that place in Mr. Stanley's map that 

 is published by the Daily Telegraph, and we are 

 all familiar with Schweinfurth's description of the 



diminutive race that fell under his own notice. 

 When fuller reports reach us, we shall no doubt 

 hear much of extreme interest on this subject, 

 which throws important light on the nature of the 

 aboriginal inhabitants of Africa, or at least of 

 those who preceded the negro. 



The point of contact between Stanley and 

 Barth's informant is at the northernmost part 

 of the great arc of the Congo, where muskets 

 were seen and robes were worn by the chiefs of 

 crimson blanket-cloth, bearing witness to the ex- 

 istence of a native trade with the north. Barth 

 himself was never within 600 miles of this spot, 

 but he was a great collector of itineraries, and 

 there was one in particular upon which he laid 

 the greatest stress. He did so with such good 

 reason, that the river of Kubanda, of which we 

 are about to speak, has ever since been regarded 

 by geographers as a fact to be accounted for in 

 whatever theory might on other grounds be ad- 

 vanced as to the hydrography of Central Africa. 

 This river, as laid down by Barth in his map, 

 coincides very fairly with the part of the Congo 

 above mentioned. Such distrust attaches itself 

 to all native information, that it is well to explain 

 at some length the qualifications of Barth's in- 

 formant ; and in doing so a double purpose will 

 be served, for we shall have further on to lay 

 much stress on the merits of the Arab civilization 

 in Africa, of which the man in question is an ex- 

 ceptionally high example. He was ! the Faki 

 Sambo, a person of the Fellatah race, and of 

 wide-spread reputation, with whom Barth spent 

 many hours of conversation at Massena, about 

 100 miles to the southeast of Lake Tchad. He 

 says: 



" I could hardly have expected to find in this 

 out-of-the-way place a man not only versed in all 

 the branches of Arabic literature, but who had even 

 read (nay, possessed a manuscript of) those por- 

 tions of Aristotle and Plato which had been trans- 

 lated into, or rather Mohammedanized in, Arabic, 

 and who possessed the most intimate knowledge 

 of the countries he had visited. . . . When he was 

 a young man, his father, who himself possessed a 

 good deal of learning, and who had written a work 

 on Hausa, sent him to Egypt, where he had studied 

 many years in the mosque of El Azhar. It had 

 been his intention to go to the town of Zebid in 

 Yemen, which is famous among the Arabs on ac- 

 count of the science of logarithms, or el hesab; but, 

 when he had reached Gunfiida, the war which 

 was raging between the Turks and the Wahabiye 

 had thwarted his projects, and he had returned to 

 Darfur, where he had settled down some time, and 



1 Barth's " Travels in Central Africa," vol. iii., p. 373. 



