•IJQ2. discoveries in Africa. 2i 



' The accounts received by the committee, of the 

 probable facility of opening a trade from great Bri- 

 tain to the various cities on the Niger, encourage a 

 belief that the inland regions of Africa may soon be 

 united with Europe in that great bond of commer- 

 cial fellowftiip which the mutual wants and diff?rent 

 productions of the other continents of the globe iiave 

 happily establiftied. Much, undoubtedly, we iKall 

 have to communicate, and something we may have 

 to learn : for the merchants of Bai-bary afsert that 

 the people of Houfsa have the art of tempering their 

 iron with more than Europe^m Ikill ; and that their 

 files in particular are much superior to those of 

 Great Britain and France. 



' To what degrees of refinement the unmeasured 

 length of succefsive generations may have improved 

 their manufactures ; or to what arts, unknown and 

 unimagined in £urope, their ample experience may 

 have given rise, the next dispatches from major 

 Houghton may probably disclose. That in some of 

 these insulated empires the knowledge and the lan- 

 guage of ancient Egypt may still imperfectly sur- 

 vive, is not an unpleasing supposition : 'nor is it ab- 

 solutely impofsible that the Carthagenians, who do 

 not appear to liave periflied with their cities, may 

 have retired to the southern parts of Africa ; and, 

 .though lost to the world in the vast oblivion of the 

 desert, may have carried with them to the new re- 

 gions they occupy, some portion of those arts and 

 sciences, and of that commercial knowledge, for 

 which the inhabitants of Carthage were once so emi- 

 nently famed.' 



