188 Course and lirobable Termination of the Niger. [[Aug. 



" I hope that, if my hypothesis as to the final disposal of the Niger be 

 sound, I shall have restored to it the ' unique and peculiar character' the 

 supposed loss of which is here deplored ; I think that if I have completed what 

 Ptolemy left incoinplete, namely, the connection between his Gier and Ni- 

 Gier — that if I have identified these two great streams after they become one 

 with the Nile of Bornou ; — if I have placed and established in the course of 

 my Niger the long-disputed position of Ulil — if I have then traced the same 

 Niger travelling for hundreds of miles under the Libyan sands — if I have for a 

 moment disinterred as it were to the mind's eye, the cities, and towns, and people 

 which once probably animated its banks ; and if I have laid bare to the imagi- 

 nation, for an instant, the now buried vallies which once smiled on its course; if 

 I have finally shown the ' unique and peculiar' Niger to be the cause of the 

 long-renowned and fatal Syrtis ; — I think that if I have been successful in doing 

 these, or some of these things, the Niger will not have suffered in my hands." 



As the Lieut.-General has probably overlooked a passage, which, from 

 its conditional nature, ought not to have been omitted, we here extract 

 it for the benefit of the reader. 



" If we take four or five degrees" (merely 240 or 300 geographical 

 miles) '' off from Ptolemy's evidently wrong latitude as given to INIount 

 Usargola, and bring down that mountain and its northern source of the 

 Niger to where it ought to be," (of course when a " mountain is in 

 labour," it is proof positive that it has been where it ought not to have 

 been) " and then take the eastern source now mentioned, and draw the 

 two streams in the map towards a common point in the Niger, we shall 

 find they will speedily coincide, and turn out to be what I have no 

 doubt they were." — -p. 84. 



In the foregoing summary, the great prevalence of the " ifs" almost 

 nullifies the conclusion. As the lawyers might saj"^, we do not think 

 the " learned General has made out his case." In such inquiries as the 

 present, mere belief is of little avail. A popular flag officer in the service, 

 was wont to say to his lieutenants, when, in their endeavours to distin- 

 guish a distant signal, they would state — " We think it such or such a 

 number," — " I want no thought in matters of sight ; J could think with 

 my eyes shut ?" 



But if we doubt oiu* own theories, we should be still more cautious in 

 placing dependence on what we are told by the natives. What, for 

 example, ought we to thiiik of the information received from individuals 

 who would gravely state, and perhaps believe, the following preposterous 

 tradition to be fact : — 



" Sheikh Hamed's grandfather talked of the immense extent of the 

 Tchad for7nerIi/ to the eastward ; but said, that it dried up miraculously, 

 after the killing of a certain ' holy man in the neighboiu'hood.' " 



Speaking of the Gulf of Sydra, the ancient Syrtis — in which, by our 

 author's theory, the Niger is lost — Sir R. says, " I have no doubt but 

 that, in very remote ages, the united Niger and Geir, that is the Nile of 

 Bournou, did roll into the sea, in all the magnificence of a mighty stream, 

 forming a grand aestuary or harbour, where now the quicksand is." — 

 p. 64. 



" It is a somewhat odd circumstance," says a writer in the Edinburgh 

 Review, on Captain Beechy's published account of the Greater Syrtis, 

 " that though quicksands have been uniformly described as characterising 

 the Syrtis, and the very names have become synonymous, there should not 

 have beenfoundj along the whole coast, such a thing as a quicksand. All the 

 general features of the coast seem mialtered ; and it would surely have 



