172 EQUATORIAL AFRICA. 



kind, interlace and crowd each other out of existence, 

 throughout an immense expanse of territory, most of 

 it apparently teeming" with exhaustless fertility; but 

 concerning whose productions, or whose resources, 

 practically nothing is known. One of the very latest 

 additions to geographical science, for example, as we 

 have already mentioned, was the discovery of the great 

 forests of the Upper Congo, of whose very existence 

 the world had previously been ignorant. 



We may all remember how geographers not con- 

 tent with simply marking upon our school atlases, this 

 region as "unknown," persisted in representing the 

 i nterior of Africa as a vast expanse of sandy desert 

 although reflective minds, arguing from analogy, might 

 very fairly have ventured to conclude that the probabi- 

 lities were all in favour of the supposition that the 

 characteristic features of the equatorial zone, as a great 

 forest region, would be found to exist there also; 

 especially when numerous great rivers were known to 

 roll down to the ocean, whose volume precluded the 

 idea of their proceeding from tracts of waterless deserts 

 or indeed from anything but a region of rains, whose 

 certain effect would, under the influence of a tropical 

 sun, be to cause a luxuriant vegetation to spring 

 up, even from a sterile soil. But that even learned 

 men, buried too often in the acquisition of useless lore, 

 entirely failed to decipher so plain a passage from the 

 great book of Nature, need cause us no surprise: it 

 only emphasizes, what we knew before, that man is but 

 a poor prophet, even the most far-seeing being but 

 too apt to be led away by erroneous fancies, while 

 they are blind to palpable facts, daily paraded under 

 their very eyes. 



