TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 793 



Proceeding southward to the region claimed especially as their own by Portu- 

 guese travellers, Messrs. Britto Capello and Ivens, who successfully reached 

 the Upper Quango in 1878, returned last January to Loanda with the intention, it 

 is said, of endeavouring to descend one of the great tributaries, of which there are 

 four whose sources have been crossed at a great elevation by Cameron and other*,. 

 but whose course for about 1,000 miles has never been followed : they are 

 now on the Kunene. An English sportsman, Mr. Hemmings, starting from 

 Walfisch Bay, has quite recently, in company with a Dutch hunter, found his 

 way partly through the Portuguese territories, partly through native states beyond 

 their boundaries, to the Congo, which he struck at Vivi. Cameron, it will be 

 remembered, was astonished by a cold of 38° F. on the watershed between the 

 Zambesi and the Kassabe in about 1 2° South latitude. Dr. Pogge compares the. 

 climate of Mussumba on the 8th parallel, in the month of December, to that of 

 North Germany, and the fact illustrates what we learn from so many other 

 quarters, that much of the interior of Africa belongs, by reason of its elevation 

 above the sea, to a far more temperate zone, and is better suited to the Euro- 

 pean constitution than its geographical position promises. The terrible prevalence' 

 of fever which has cost so many lives will probably be mitigated in time and by 

 improved accommodation. The hills are comparatively free from it. Having alluded 

 to Dr. Paul Pogge, whose death at Loanda in March last deprives geography of 

 an adventurous explorer, I may add that the account of his journey in 1875 to 

 Mussumba, the capital of the powerful negro kingdom of the Muata Yanvo, or 

 Matianvo of Livingstone, published in 1880, remains to be translated. That great 

 traveller failed to reach it. Cameron crossed the territory, but a long way to the 

 south of it, and no previous scientific traveller, that I am aware of, has described 

 it. Dr. Pogge resided there four or five months, and we learn many interesting 

 particulars from him, and from Dr. Max Biichner, a subsequent traveller. The 

 people, although Fetish worshippers, practise the rite of circumcision : they are 

 a fine, warlike race, unhappily addicted to slave-hunting, but far in advance of 

 their cannibal neighbours of Kauanda. Their institutions are of a feudal character- 

 Muata Yanvo is an hereditary title. Among many peculiar customs is one 

 which invests one of the king's half-sisters, under the designation of the Luko- 

 kesha, with the second authority in the kingdom. She is forbidden to marry, but 

 permitted a sort of morganatic alliance with a slave, any offspring being ruth- 

 lessly destroyed, and on the death of the king she has the principal voice in 

 determining his successor, who, however, must be selected from among the sons of 

 the late king. Since Dr. Pogge's visit the Muata Yanvo has been deposed and 

 poisoned by his Lukokesha. The extraordinary custom prevails here that a mans; 

 children do not belong to him, but to the eldest brother of their mother, and 

 should a child die the father must make compensation. Surely I have now- 

 justified the remark I made above on human perversities. 



10. As many of my hearers may not be fully aware of the rapid extension of 

 white occupation, hardly as yet to be called settlement, in Central Africa, and of 

 the early fruit borne by the heroic life and death of Livingstone, and other scarcely 

 less devoted travellers and philanthropists, and as many of the places are not to be 

 found in any ordinary atlas, I give at the end a table as complete as I have been 

 able to make it, of actual centres of communication or trade, or missionary instruc- 

 tion now established there. Lake Nyassa, we are told, is becoming a busy inland 

 sea. There are two steamers upon it, and one on the River Shire. Upon Tanganyika- 

 three. Many years cannot elapse before the primitive and costly practice of carry- 

 ing goods by an army of porters will be a thing of the past, when pack animals,, 

 perhaps wheeled vehicles, will have replaced them. Donkeys have been already 

 introduced, with good promise, by the Universities' missionaries and the African 

 Lakes Company, although they have not been a success on the Congo. That first 

 necessity of civilisation, a road of some sort, will connect the petty capitals, 

 and link in friendly communication tribes which know one another now 

 chiefly by hostilities and reprisals. The African Lakes Company, of Glasgow, 

 has ten small depots between Quillimane and Malawanda on Lake Nyassa, and 

 from this place a practicable road of 220 miles has been carried to Pambete, on 



