WOMEN IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 257 



they have won for themselves an unique position among 

 women explorers. 



Miss Kingsley the niece of the well-known writer and 

 naturalist, Charles Kingsley exhibited much of her uncle 's 

 literary ability and love of nature. So complete was her 

 intellectual grasp of the most difficult problems, and so 

 rare was her overflowing sympathy for all of God's crea- 

 tures, that she was well described as possessing ' ' the brain 

 of a man and the heart of a woman." 



In order to get at first-hand information that was neces- 

 sary to complete a work which her father, George Kingsley, 

 had, owing to his premature death, left unfinished, she de- 

 termined to visit that part of West Africa "where all 

 authorities agreed that the Africans were at their wildest 

 and worst." Accompanied only by the natives, she trav- 

 elled among cannibals, pushed her way through mangrove 

 swamps and pestilential morasses. She spent months in a 

 canoe exploring the territory watered by the Calabar and 

 Ogowe rivers, often in imminent peril of death from wild 

 animals or wilder men. 



When not studying the manners and customs of the 

 native tribes, she was hunting fishes and reptiles in stream* 

 and quagmires and collecting insects in the weird, grim 

 twilight of the equatorial forest with its inextricable tangle 

 of creepers, its great hanging tapestries of vines and flow- 

 ers, its myriads of bush-ropes, suspended from the summits 

 of tall buttressed trees, "some as straight as plumb lines, 

 others coiled round and intertwined among each other until 

 one could fancy one was looking on some mighty battle 

 between armies of gigantic serpents that had been arrested 

 at its height by some mighty spell." 



The results of Miss Kingsley 's wanderings in this dark 

 and uncanny wilderness and among the savage tribes vis- 

 ited by her were her two instructive volumes entitled 

 Travels in West Africa and West African Studies. In 

 addition to these two works from her pen there are de- 



