iSogai Institution of ffireat IStttatn. 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING. 



Friday, January 25, 1895. 



Sir Douglas Galton, K.C.B. D.C.L. F.R.S. Vice-President, 

 in the Chair, 



Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, K.C.M.G. C.S.I. 

 The Nile. 



I am to speak to you to-night of the Nile, and I think I may fairly 

 say it is the most famous river in all the world : famous, through all 

 the ages, for the civilisation that has existed on its banks ; famous for 

 its mystic fabulous rise, about which so many sages and philosophers 

 have pondered ; famous for its length, traversing one-fifth the distance 

 from pole to pole ; famous, and apparently destined to be famous, for 

 the political combinations that ever centre around it. But I feel I 

 must begin by an apology, for now that Egypt has come so completely 

 within the tourist's range, probably many of my hearers have seen 

 more of the Nile than I have. 



If a foreigner were to lecture to his countrymen about the river 

 Thames, and were to begin by informing them that he had never been 

 above Greenwich, he might be looked upon as an impostor; and 

 perhaps I am not much better, for I have never been higher up the 

 river than Philae, 610 miles above Cairo. For information regard- 

 ing anything higher up, I must go, like you, to the works of Speke, 

 Baker, Stanley and our other great explorers. I shall not, then, 

 detain you to-night with any elaborate account of this upper portion 

 of the river, but will only remind you briefly of that great inland sea, 

 the Victoria Nyanza — in extent only a little less than the American 

 Lake Superior — traversed by the equator, and fed by many rivers, 

 some of them taking their rise as far as 5° S. lat. These rivers 

 form the true source of the Nile, the mystery only solved in the 

 present generation. 



The outlet of this great lake is on its north shore, where the river 

 rushes over the Ripon Falls, estimated by Speke at only 400 or 500 

 feet wide, and with a drop of 12 feet. Thence the river's course is in 

 a north-west direction for 270 miles, to where it thunders over the 

 Murchison Falls, a cliff of 120 feet high. Soon after that it joins 

 the northern end of Baker's lake, the Albert Nyanza, but only to 

 leave it again, and to pursue its course through a great marshy land 

 for more than 600 miles, to where Bahr Gazelle joins it from the 

 west. A little further down the great Saubat tributary comes in on 

 the east. This is the region in which the river is obstructed by 

 islands of floating vegetation, which, if checked in their course, at 



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