~ Abhebbad before reaching the ocean. 
“Dee. 30, I 869] 
~ maps.” 
NWALORE 
241 
seems to be the first time that the designation of ‘* Nyanza” 
has been applied, without any qualification, to the separate 
Lake Tanganyika... I perceive that ‘‘F.R.G.S.” associates 
Captain Burton with this ‘‘Nyanza;” but such a name was 
never given to it by its discoverer, neither is it generally known 
by any other designation than that of ‘‘ Lake Tanganyika :” 
whether or not it should properly be called the ‘Lake of 
Tanganyika” is of no moment. 
I come now to the consideration of Dr. Livingstone’s claim to 
the discovery of the sources of the Nile, which will be best given 
in his own words’: ‘‘I think that I may safely assert that the 
chief sources of the Nile rise between 10° and 12° south latitude, 
or nearly in the position attributed to them by Ptolemy, whose 
river Rhaptus is probably the Rovuma.” On this ‘‘F.R.G.S.” 
acutely remarks : ‘* Here two different problems are attempted to 
be solved at once—the one touching the sources of the White 
Nile, and the other those of Ptolemy’s Nile ;” in which remark 
he is no doubt substantially correct. Into the question of 
_ Ptolemy’s sources of the Nile, on which subject “F.R.G.S.” and I 
differ widely, I need not now enter: what I have here to do with, 
is the question of the chief sources ‘of the Nile. And in order 
to decide whether Dr. Livingstone has really discovered these 
sources, it is, in the first instance, requisite to define the limits 
of the basin of the Nile, so as absolutely to determine where 
the sources of the river can or can not be situated. As those 
limits were approximatively determined in a paper ‘*On the Nile 
and its Tributaries,” communicated to the Royal Geographical 
Society in 1846, and published in the seventeenth volume of the 
Society’s Journal, I cannot do better than reproduce the portion 
of it relating to this particular subject. 
After describing the physical character of the table-land of 
Eastern Africa,of which Abyssinia forms the northern extremity, 
and its rivers as far as they were then known,—on which subject 
I need not dilate, as the substantial correctness of my_views is 
now established, —I proceeded in these terms :— 
_ “All the streams of the plateau or western counter-slope of 
the Abyssinian chain are affluents of the Nile, and their eastern- 
most branches take their rise at the extreme eastern edge of the 
table-land, which is the limit of the basin of the Nile, and the 
watershed between its tributaries and the rivers flowing E. and 
S.E. towards the Indian Ocean. On the seaward side of this 
watershed, the declivity being much more abrupt and its extent 
inuch more limited, the rivers must necessarily be of se- 
condary importance. Thus, proceeding from the N., we 
do not meet with a stream deserving of name until we come 
to the Hawash; and even that river is, near Aussa, lost in Lake 
The river Haines of 
Lieutenant Christopher, which is the next in succession, appears, 
in like manner, not to have sufficient power to reach the sea, 
at least not at all times of the year. Further to the S. we 
find the river Gowin (¢.e. Wabbi-Giweyna) or Jubb, possess- 
ing. a substantive character as an ocean stream ; but this river, 
during the dry season, has at its mouth a depth of only two feet. 
At a short distance to the S. of the equator is the Ozay, 
which river, though said to be of great extent, has very little 
water at the entrance. Further S. the same law appears to 
prevail, as is exemplified in the Lufiji or Kwavi (Quavi), the 
~Livuma [Rovuma] and the Kwama (Quama) or Kilimane (Qui- 
limane), which rivers rise on the eastern edge of the elevated 
plain in which Lake Zambre or N’yassi is situate, and flow into 
the Indian Ocean. J/ere, however, the southern extremity of the 
basin of the Nile having been passed, the larger streams of the 
counter-slope no longer join that river, but take their course 
westwards into the Atlantic, belonging in fact to a distinct 
hydrographical basin.” 
What I thus wrote three-and-twenty years ago requires now 
but. little modification, The erroneous identification of Lake 
Zambre with N’yassi was simply adopted from Mr. Cooley’s 
learned and valuable paper in the fifteenth volume of the 
Society’s Journal, which was then our only authority on the 
subject. I also followed him in his alteration of the spelling 
of the name ‘*‘ Zambre,” which in my paper was printed ‘‘ Zam- 
beze,” with the explanatory note, ‘* This name is usually printed 
Zembere, Zembre, or Zambre. It is the*Lake A7Zaravi of the 
Though eyen this was wrong; for Nyassa is properly 
Lake Marayi, and Tanganyika is the Great Lake, or Zambre. 
The blending of the two together by Delilleand D’Anvyille was the 
» primary cause of the long-existing misapprehension of the subject. 
In my paper from which the foregoing extract is taken, when 
_ speaking of the lakes and swamps of the Upper Nile as then 
known, I added in a note, ‘* May not Lake Zambre (‘ Zambeze’), 
or Nyassi, be the continuation of this series of lakes? In this 
case it would be simply the upper course of the Nile.” 
Acting on this suggestion, Professor Berghaus, in 1850, laid 
down Mr. Cooley’s ‘* Nyassi, or the Sea” as the head of the 
Nile; but, as I pointed out to him, he had under any cir- 
cumstances carried the river too far south, because the Chevalier 
Bunsen and T had in the previous year come to the positive 
conclusion, on the reports of the Church missionaries at Mombas, 
that Zambre (now Tanganyika) and Nyassa were two separate 
lakes, a conclusion which every fresh discovery only tended to. 
confirm. 
The Cuama and Quilimane mentioned by me were all that 
we then well knew of the Zambesi, the great western extent of 
which river only became revealed to us through the former ex- 
plorations of Livingstone. He thus absolutely closed the basin 
of the Nile in that direction; though the fact of his having 
done so was not then demonstrable. When he wrote to Lord 
Clarendon in February 1867, as he says in his present letter, 
he ‘‘had the impression that he was then on the watershed 
between the Zambesi and either the Congo or the Nile.” His 
present determination of the want of connection between the 
Chambeze and the Zambesi, and of the western and north- 
western course of the former river, has proved the soundness 
of his impression of February 1867. 
The question is therefore now narrowed to this:—Do the 
united streams of the Chambeze and the Lufira, under the name 
first of Luapula, and then of Lualaba, flow into the Nile or into 
the Congo? I am of opinion that they join the former river, 
and that the explorations of Dr. Livingstone have established 
the correctness of the views I have long entertained, and 
especially those enunciated in the Atheneum, No. 1,969, of July 
22, 1865, on the first announcement by Sir Samuel Baker of his 
(unconscious) discovery of the main stream of the Nile under the 
name of ‘‘Albert Nyanza,” and consequently I believe we are at 
length enabled to strip the veil from the Nile Mystery. 
CHARLES BEKE 
Bekesbourne, December 1 
Food of Oceanic Animals 
UNDER the above head, in a note which appeared in NATURE 
of the 16th Dec. p. 192, Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys ‘‘ calls the attention 
of physiologists to the fact that plant-life appears to be absent in 
the ocean, with the exception of a comparatively narrow fringe, 
known as the littoral and laminarian zones, which girds the 
coasts, and of the ‘Sargasso’ tract in the Gulf of Mexico.” He 
then proceeds to say that, ‘‘during the recent exploration in 
H.M.S. Porcupine of part of the North Atlantic, he could not 
detect the slightest trace of any vegetable organism at a greater | 
depth than fifteen fathoms. Animal organisms of all kinds and 
sizes, living and dead, were everywhere abundant, from the surface 
to the bottom... some of them being zoophagons, others 
sarcophagons, none phytophagons.” And, lastly, after asking | 
‘whence do oceanic animals get that supply of carbon which - 
terrestrial and? littoral or shallow-water animals derive, directly 
or indirectly, from plants ?” and “‘can any class of marine animals 
assimilate the carbon contained in the sea, as plants assimilate the 
carbon contained in the air?” Mr. Jeffreys sums up his con- 
clusions on the subject in the following words :—‘‘ At all events, 
the usual theory, that all animals ultimately depend for their 
nourishment on vegetable life, seems not to be applicable to 
the main ocean, and consequently not to one-half (sic) of the 
earth’s surface.” ; 
As Mr. Jeffreys has been constituted an authority on deep-sea 
exploration, and now claims the view above cited as original, L 
must be permitted to point out that he has either forgotten what, 
at one period, he professed to have read and acquiesced in, in one 
of my. writings; or that, for some unaccountable reason, he now 
repudiates both my opinions and those which were once his own. 
As the entire absence of plant-life, even in its primitive phases, 
in the deeper-abysses of the ocean, and the process whereby the 
nutrition of the lowest animal forms is secured in the absence of 
even the rudimentary digestive apparatus which is observable 
amongst the higher Rhizopods, were fully discussed by me in my 
“*Notes on the Presence of Animal Life at great depths in the 
Ocean” (p. 27), published in 1860; in my work on ‘*The North 
Sea-bed” (pp. 131-2), published in 1862; in a note which 
appeared in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for 
August 1863 (p. 166); and more recently in two papers con- 
tributed by me to the Monthly Fournal of Microscopical 
