Older Border of Africa. 239 



Central Africa, including all that portion of the continent lying 

 Ijetween, say, the Albert Nyanza and the river Zambesi, and 

 Zanzibar and the Congo mouth, and which, although no part 

 now remains of it that is not nominally the territory either of 

 the Congo Free state or some European power, is still almost 

 entirely in the possession and occupation of its lawful owners, 

 the native uncivilized tribes. 



As well as this transverse political division of Africa, we may 

 make what may be called a concentric analysis. Commencing 

 with the outer skin, the 16,000 miles of African coast, we find 

 upon it certain excrescences, which, if our examination went but 

 skin-deep, might well lead us to regard Africa not as a " new," 

 but as an "old, old " world. On the north and east the remains 

 of ancient civilizations, Morocco, Tangier, Egypt, remind us of 

 Africa's bygone grandeur — remind us hoAV very much of forms 

 of beauty and secrets of science and art came to us in the birth 

 of civilized Europe from or through Africa. On the south and 

 west again, memorials of Phoenician, of Portuguese, of Dutch, 

 English and American conquering visitors and adventurers re- 

 mind us of the constant preying of the nations on the dark con- 

 tinent — remind us, through certain prison castles still to be seen 

 on the western coast, of the great world's crime, the slave trade. 

 But on the outer surface of Africa other signs are to be read : 

 North, south, east and west there are ports and roadsteads 

 forested with the masts of the world's shipping conveying to 

 Africa's every shore those products of the civilized world which, 

 according to their nature for good or harm, are to influence and 

 civilize the Africans ; carrying away from her shore the land's 

 products — a constant stream, increasing perhaps just now, but 

 which has always been flowing — of wool, cotton, oil, rich spices, 

 dyes and medicinal and ornamental woods, india-rubber, gum- 

 copal, ivory, precious stones, gold. Are these the products of a 

 desert land inhabited only by a lazy and savage people ? 



Following our concentric analysis, the first layer behind the 

 outer skin of Africa may be said to consist of a verdant slope, 

 broad and luxuriant in the tropics, where nature herself has 

 been lavish, narrower, but still ever widening, in the drier north 

 and south, as the oriental and the European respectively advance 

 their groves of fruit and fields of corn, maintained in luxuriance 

 alike by the vapors of the sea and the down drainage from the 

 higher lands, and from the same causes also malarious and un- 



