1831.] Discoveries in Africa. 395 



resources, and that the wisdom of nature will continue to bloom when 

 the idle fears and theories of the day have faded away and perished. 



The liope of civilizing Africa, must depend on its being made fit to 

 sustain civilized communities, which from its present natural constitution 

 it is unfit to do ; one immense portion of it being overspread with 

 barren sands, and another being alternately turned into a bog by rains 

 and rivers, and into a nest of contagion by the action of the sun upon 

 this mighty morass. 



Between the tropics it is constantly raining somewhere, and the rain 

 falls in quantities that absolutely overwhelm the country. The hot 

 winds constantly follow the sun from tropic to tropic, and the vapours 

 which they raise, on reaching the higher regions of the atmosphere, 

 and being chilled, are constantly poured down in rain. A country of a 

 thousand miles on the north and south of the line, is thus kept constantly 

 in a state of the most powerful irrigation, and the direct result is, a most 

 superabundant fertility for the month or two while the earth is drying, 

 and excessive heat and excessive moisture first come in full combination. 

 Yet for the remainder of the dry period, the land is a sink of pestilence; 

 so deadly from its miasmata, and so torturing from the swarms of insects 

 generated by the heat, that man and the inferior animals perish in great 

 numbers, or fly even to the desert, where they had rather encounter the 

 tremendous fierceness of the sun, than the agony of the innumerable 

 stings that haunt them in the fertile soil. The country is covered with 

 immense marshes, and thick jungles, where the over-luxuriance of the 

 vegetation checks the air, and all is fever and death. 



We see that the whole question turns on the distribution of the rains. 

 Too much water, or too little, makes the misfortune of Africa ; and the 

 only remedy for the evils which convert one of the richest soils of the 

 world into a grave, or a nest of reptiles, is to be found in equalizing this 

 gift of nature. It is impossible to doubt that a vast portion of the wil- 

 dernesses of Africa would produce the fruits of the earth, if they had 

 water. We find in the heart of the desert, vegetation Avhere ever there 

 is a well, and a little colony, surrounded by woods and rich fields, where 

 ever there is any thing like a regular supply of water. The grand prob- 

 lem would be to lead the superfluity of the ti-opical rains from the in- 

 numerable rivers, and immense lakes of Central Africa, into regions now 

 condemned to perpetual dryness. The results would be to dry the 

 watery morass into productive soil, and to water the burning sand alike 

 into fertihty ; in fact, to drain the centre of the country, and to irrigate 

 all the rest : and for this purpose the peculiar construction of the conti- 

 nent seems to offer no trivial advantages. 



The whole central belt of Africa runs directly under the equator, and 

 from the known figure, and the actual formation of the land, this central 

 belt is so lofty that it pours its rivers, the collection of its rains, down 

 on both sides through the continent in great abundance and force. Den- 

 ham computes the lake Tchad, one of the reservoirs of those rivers, at 

 twelve hundred feet above the level of the sea, and the ground beyond it 

 towards the south was still rising. Bruce computed the southern ele- 

 vation to which he had reached, at two miles above the level of the sea, 

 and this is probably but a small part of the whole elevation. To use 

 Miijor Head's words, " It being true that there are a series of vast tanks 

 and reservoirs placed by nature above the thirsting deserts of Africa, the 

 stagnation, as well as the rapid evaporation of which, now pollute the 



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