3342 The Zoologist— January, 1873. 



human race in Africa, after attaining the highest state of so-called 

 civilization as attested by architecture, evidence that cannot be 

 gainsaid, has yielded gradually and grudgingly to the inevitable 

 process of decay to which every unit, family or nation must sooner 

 or later succumb, and that Nature, after Copt, Moor, Arab, Kelt 

 and Teuton have contested the soil with her inch by inch, has con- 

 quered them all and promises to reign supreme from the Mediter- 

 ranean to the Cape. The Sphinx — riddle or wreck, defying or 

 deriding the mutilations of time, Kelt and Teuton— is yielding to 

 the silent advance of sand ; the elephant, once the submissive slave 

 of Hanno and Hannibal, has thrown off the yoke of man and ranges 

 at liberty through the length and breadth of the land. I am aware 

 there is what may be called a fringe of civilization all round her sea- 

 board; but we must contemplate the land-marks set up thousands of 

 years ago, if we would understand and appreciate what is meant 

 by " her ancient civilization^^ and we must watch year by year the 

 progress of the sand around the architectural splendours of Karnac 

 and Edfou to understand the irresistible yet silent strength which 

 Nature is exerting to regain her own. The most gigantic and suc- 

 cessful enterprise of modern times, an enterprise so vast that the 

 sober-minded believed it impossible, is but the faint echo, the 

 diluted copy of a labour accomplished centuries on centuries before, 

 a labour which Nature had in her irresistible persistency determined 

 to obliterate. Africa is now the paradise of the naturalist, the 

 paradise of the beasts and the birds he delights to seek and to 

 study. 



The Birds of Africa — but I must keep them waiting yet a moment 

 longer, for the Nile, that problem and puzzle of all historical 

 generations, has not yet been so much as mentioned, and the Nile 

 was the cherished mystery of my boyhood : twenty years before I 

 can recollect, James Bruce had issued his four ponderous volumes, 

 which, to take his own valuation, were " the most magnificent 

 present in that line ever made by a subject to a sovereign." In 

 1815 Mungo Park's second journey was published by Wishaw, and 

 attracted a great deal of attention, and I was old enough to feel 

 jealous of a reputation which seemed an interference with that of 

 the magnificent Bruce: my school Geography, a very humble 

 volume divided into numbered paragraphs, and bound in smooth 

 red leather without lettering or ornamentation of any kind, assured 

 me that " the source of the Nile was finally settled on the 14th of 



