I QO FORESTS AND MALARIAL FEVER. 



place, such in fact as we should never care to see again. 



But one of the glories of a traveller's life is that 

 these wonderful instances of the boundless wealth and 

 magnificence of the works of Nature never pall upon 

 our recollection. They are among the very few things 

 that seem never to grow old, but always, so long as 

 life itself may last, form bright pictures, which the 

 memory loves to dwell upon. 



Unfortunately, on account of their inaccessibility 

 and a vague fear of the deadly nature of the climate, 

 the equatorial forest scenes are witnessed under their 

 finest aspects by an infinitesimally small number of 

 our travelling community, though almost every vegetable 

 treasure both known and unknown, of the tropical 

 world, is to be found in them. Now, though it is im- 

 possible to deny that Europeans travelling in these 

 regions always incur a certain amount of risk from 

 malarial fever, etc., yet so long as the country is not 

 of a low-lying, swampy nature, recent experiences seem 

 to point to the conclusion that the risk is not always 

 so great as is generally supposed: for it is worthy of 

 note that so long as the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 

 in its progress across the African continent, remained in 

 the forest, they suffered comparatively little from fever, 

 and it was of very mild types in those few cases that did 

 occur; but when they reached the grass land, and got 

 into the open bush country, all the Europeans, almost 

 without exception, suffered severely. * These facts 

 rather seem to point to the conclusion that the direct 

 rays of the vertical sun have, at any rate under certain 

 conditions, a considerable influence in predisposing to 

 attacks of fever. It is also probable that the malarial 



* Darkest Africa, by H. M. Stanley, 1890, Vol. ii., pp. 31 33. 



