518 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 
Srcrion E.—GEOGRAPHY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEcTION.—CoLONEL Sir C. M. Watson, K.C.M.G., 
by OLA. fy. 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Tue last occasion upon which the City of Dundee extended its hospitality to 
the members of the British Association was in 1867, forty-five years ago, and, at 
that meeting, the President of the Geological Section was Sir Samuel Baker, 
who had then recently returned from his explorations on the Upper Nile, for 
which he had been awarded the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical 
Society, and which were of the greatest importance as regards that then little- 
known river. | 
In the Address which he gave to Section E, Sir Samuel Baker naturally 
referred at considerable length to the geography of the Sudan, and to the ques- 
tion of the sources of the Nile, which had been discovered a few years pre- 
viously by Captain Speke and Captain Grant, when they visited the great lake, 
named by them the Victoria Nyanza, out of which flows the main branch of the 
river, the fertiliser of Egypt, which, after a course of more than 3,500 miles, 
pours its waters into the Mediterranean. He also spoke of the second great 
lake, the Albert Nyanza, which he had himself discovered, after a long and very 
arduous journey, though, perhaps naturally, he did not dwell so much on what 
he had himself accomplished, as another speaker might have done. The words 
he spoke are well worth calling to remembrance, and, on reading them over, 
one is struck by the fact that hardly anything was then known of the country 
through which he travelled, but that, thanks to him and his predecessors, Speke 
and Grant, the first steps were taken which led to half-a-century of steady 
progress in geographical knowledge, until now the basin of the Upper Nile 
is fairly well known and fairly well mapped. 
To-day I propose to take up the tale where Sir Samuel Baker had to stop, and 
to give a short réswmé of the story of the Sudan since those days, more especially 
from the geographical point of view; but it will be necessary briefly to allude to 
its history also, for, in this case, as in all others, history and geography are 
closely united, and it is difficult to understand one without knowing something 
of the other. 
There is a considerable amount of uncertainty in the minds of some people 
as to what the Sudan is, an uncertainty not without reason, as the word has an 
ethnological rather than a geographical meaning. The complete word, Balad-es- 
Sudan, is an Arabic expression for the country of the black people, and there- 
fore includes, theoretically, all those parts of Africa which are inhabited by 
negro or negroid races. There has, however, been such a mingling of different 
races that it would be difficult to say to what part of the great continent the word 
Sudan should properly be applied. But, of recent years, changing from its 
original ethnological meaning, it has come to be regarded as the name of a more 
limited area; and perhaps the simplest definition is that it includes all the 
