January 21, 1892J 



NATURE 



267 



with him ; and there now came the sad story of the 

 sorrowful fate of the rear cohimn. The long confinement 

 in the fort had at last come to an end ; and after but 

 three days, which were spent in getting in stragglers and 

 packing up, Fort Bodo was burnt, and this little oasis of 

 cultivation in the dark forest was abandoned to its fate. 

 By January 9, 1889, Kandekore was reached, the pro- 

 css being but slow, owing to the number of sick men, 

 and here Parke was left again in charge of what he calls a 

 " Convalescent Home," with Nelson to keep him com- 

 pany. This " Home" was made fairly comfortable, and 

 was not left until February 12, when Rashid, the head 

 chief of the Zanzibaris, arrived from Mr. Stanley with a 

 number of Zanzibaris and Mazambonis. Parke now 

 heard for the first time of how Emin Pasha and Jephson 

 had been taken prisoners, and had been sent to Rejaf. 

 All hands were soon employed procuring food for the 

 next few days' march, and Kandekore was abandoned on 

 the I2th, the party joining Mr. Stanley on February 18. 



The much-wished-for journey to the coast commenced 

 on April 10. There was a mixed multitude, old people 

 and quite young children, but they were only well on the 

 march, when a return of the illness which brought Mr. 

 Stanley so near death's door at Fort Bodo, delayed the 

 expedition at Mazzamboni's camp until May 8. Some 

 difficulty was experienced in crossing the Semliki River, 

 which flows into the Albert Nyanza, the graphic account 

 of which crossing will be familiar to the readers of 

 Stanley's volumes. On August 20 the expedition was at 

 Usambiro, a missionary station, where a rest of a couple 

 of days was taken, and at which station Dr. Parke's regular 

 diary ceased, owing to an attack of ophthalmia, which 

 clung to him until he reached the coast. They arrived 

 at Bagamoyo on December 4, 1889, and here the un- 

 fortunate accident happened to Emin Pasha, who was 

 fortunate though in this, that Dr. Parke was near him, 

 and by his careful nursing and skilled attention brought 

 the Pasha through a most serious illness. After Emin 

 Pasha was in a fair way to recovery. Dr. Parke became 

 alarmingly ill, but was able to sail for Suez in January 

 1890, and arrived in Cairo on the i6thof the same month, 

 after an absence of nearly three years. The volume 

 appropriately finishes with a warm and grateful acknow- 

 ledgment of his great indebtedness to the several com- 

 panions of his dangerous journeys ; of one and all of 

 whom he has something pleasant and kind to say. Under 

 trials and troubles of no ordinary nature that had so 

 constantly surrounded them, each did for the other what 

 he could, and long after the painful episodes are for- 

 gotten, those of a pleasurable nature remain, stored up 

 in the memory. 



No man could wish for greater thanks than those 

 which Mr. Stanley paid his friend the doctor. The un- 

 qualified delight with which Mr. Stanley acknowledges 

 that his devotion to duty was as perfect as human nature 

 was capable of, is recorded in the first pages of " Darkest 

 Africa." These praises of his chief were echoed far and 

 wide among Parke's friends and associates at home, so as 

 if it were possible to make up for those many sad and 

 weary days spent by him in the forests and deserts of 

 Africa. 



And now, if our task was only to lay before our readers 

 a brief account of what they will find in detail in this 

 NO. I 160, VOL. 45] 



volume, it was at an end ; but it appears to us to be out 

 duty not to leave certain features of this book without criti- 

 cism. After what we have written, it need not be insisted 

 upon that, as an officer of the Emin Relief Expedition, 

 Dr. Parke did his duty in a splendid manner, and it was 

 as a matter of right that a full measure of praise should 

 be meted out to him therefor. Opinions will differ if i 

 was equally his duty to publish all his rough notes, ex- 

 tending to over 500 pages, as a supplement to Stanley's 

 work ; and still more will opinions differ as to whether he 

 was at all entitled to give English-reading people the 

 contents of his note-book, making no change whatever in 

 them, excepting the necessary ones in the " elementary 

 departments of orthography and syntax." We cordially 

 grant that the history of how this journal was put to- 

 gether demands and should receive many excuses for 

 "its many shortcomings in style and arrangement," but 

 we also think that the author should have hesitated long 

 and taken good advice before he printed all the facts and 

 statements that now must remain on record for ever, and, 

 we feel bound to add, many of which should never have 

 been permitted to appear in print in such a work. 



Most of the blemishes to which we thus refer could 

 have been easily avoided by the smallest amount of care 

 in editing, indeed the reader of the proofs might have 

 queried the repetitions and contradictions that cannot 

 fail to have met his usually sharp eyes ; others that it 

 might have been considered impertinent for such a one 

 to point out would have been pruned of their offensive- 

 ness by the suggestions of any cultured friend. It is 

 difficult without offence to be so plain-spoken as to fully 

 justify these remarks, yet the coarse allusions to certain 

 physiological and pathological phenomena in this volume 

 — not occurring here and there, but scattered very gener- 

 ally through it — must plead our justification. No doubt 

 but in the journal of a medical officer one expects to hear 

 of the diseases to which those under his charge suc- 

 cumbed, and of the various accidents which befell them, 

 and we could pass by the tedious little repetitions of 

 such, as being the result of a day-to-day record ; but no 

 such excuses are possible for such references as those 

 about the Monbuttu pygmy during the preparation for 

 operating on Lieutenant Stairs ; and it may be, perhaps, a 

 matter of taste if particulars such as are given of the 

 condition of the author when ill at Fort Bodo, or of 

 Nelson's sufferings and his own at Ipoto, are in good 

 style, except in a professional treatise. 



It is also a subject of profound regret, but not one for 

 censure, that our author seems to have had no know- 

 ledge of animal or plant life, nor even, unless when in the 

 company of Emin, any taste for a study of his fellow-man ; 

 we might add that he even exhibits a contempt for such 

 studies, for on more than one occasion he alludes to 

 Emin's natural history investigations as " bug hunting " ; 

 Had it been otherwise, what opportunities there were for 

 destroying that monotony from which he suffered, and 

 what value even some slight knowledge of plants might 

 have been to one who for months had to subsist on 

 vegetable food ; even the knowledge that the pygmy 

 woman possessed was of some service, and she evidently 

 was intelligent enough to have enabled the author to 

 have made out with h?r aid a short vocabulary of her 

 native language. 



