174 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tlie largest in Alaska, and was put up during the life of Ebbits, a 

 Tongas cliief who was named in honor of one of John Jacob Astor's 

 captains. A tablet near by reads: 



"TO THE MEMORY OF EBBITS, 



HEAD CHIEF OF THE TONGAS, 



WHO DIED IN 1880, AGED 100 YEARS/' 



At one o'clock we started for Simpson. The run of twelve miles 

 was made in about two hours, and within less than half a day's time 

 we were aboard the magnificent steamer Islander, bound for Port 

 Essington. 



ASPECTS OF NATURE IN THE AFRICAN SAHARA. 

 A SUMMER JOURNEY. 



By Professor ANGELf) HEILPEI^'. 

 II. 



MORE than one traveler has remarked that the most important 

 lesson that traveling teaches is to unlearn that which has been 

 learned before. No matter how seemingly truthful a picture may 

 be, how carefully worded a description is, somehow or other the 

 actual fact rebels against the conception which has been brought 

 to the mind. The great African desert repeated the lesson that 

 was taught to me a few years before by the icy wilderness of the 

 far North, and still earlier by the primeval fastnesses of the tropics. 

 Is it that the description of a new country is so difiicult a task, or 

 that the narrator intentionally beguiles himself into an excess 

 of imagination, which makes the telling or the conveying of the 

 simple truth so seemingly impossible? The late Professor Drum- 

 mond, in his work on Tropical Africa, ventured to lift the veil 

 from the picture that had generally been drawn of the dark con- 

 tinent, and assumed to disenchant the reader of preconceived notions 

 regarding vast and impenetrable primeval forests, of gayly plu- 

 maged birds, of monkeys swinging from trapezes in shaded bowers, 

 etc. But for this mendacious effort to destroy an old picture and to 

 reconstruct a new one he was sharply taken to task by Mr. Stanley, 

 who averred that the true picture of Africa as drawn by Professor 

 Drummond bore " no more resemblance to tropical Africa than the 

 tors of Devon, or the moors of Yorkshire, or the downs of Dover 

 represent the smiling scenes of England, of leafy Warwickshire, the 

 gardens of Kent, and the glorious vales of the isle." In short, 



