JDNE 20, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



927 



the cropped ears of his courtiers and the 

 human skulls at the gate made Livingstone 

 indisposed to look on him with favor. 

 Kazembe was usually attended by his exe- 

 cutioner, who wore a broad Luuda sword 

 imder his arm, and a scissor-like instru- 

 ment at his neck for cropping ears. This 

 was the punishment inflicted on all who in- 

 curred the Kazembe 's displeasure. 



Kazembe sat before his hut on a square 

 seat placed on lion and leopard skins. 



He was clothed in white Manchester print and a 

 red baize petticoat so as to look like a crinoline 

 put on wrong side foremost. His arms, legs and 

 head were covered with ornaments, and a cap made 

 of various-colored beads in neat patterns. A 

 erown of yellow feathers surmounted his cap. His 

 head men came forward, shaded by a huge ill- 

 made umbrella and followed by dependents. . . . 



This Central African monarch (whose 

 descendant was finally deposed for cruelties 

 by the British government) bore an evil 

 reputation ; yet he was a good friend to 

 Livingstone and put no obstacle in his 

 path ; though he politely told him that lakes 

 and rivers only consisted of water, and 

 that to ascertain this fact by ocular inspec- 

 tion would not repay him for his fatigues 

 and outlay in ti'ade goods ! 



Livingstone from boyhood had taken a 

 great interest in botany and in the appear- 

 ance of trees and flowers in the landscape. 

 His observant glance led him to note all 

 the more salient features of the African 

 flora from the Cape to the equatorial for- 

 ests of Manyuema. His books are full of 

 little word-pictures of the strange, stately 

 or beautiful trees and plants he encounters. 

 He records in his journal the spectacle of 

 the Crinum "lilies" of the Luangwa val- 

 ley, which in the first rains ' ' flower so pro- 

 fusely that they almost mask the rich, dark, 

 red color of the loamy soil, and form a 

 covering of pure white where the land has 

 been cleared by the hoe." The weird 

 stone- or pebble-like Mesembryanthemums 



of the Kalahari Desert, and the gouty, 

 leafless geraniums and vividly colored 

 pumpkins and gourds of the same region 

 arrest his attention; the Bauhinia bushes 

 with their golden or bluish tinted, bifid 

 leaves, and the scale insects on them exud- 

 ing a sweet manna; the noble giraffe-aca- 

 cia trees, the euphorbias of very diverse 

 modes of growth, the Strophanthus creep- 

 ers whose seeds possess medicinal or vio- 

 lently poisonous qualities, the borassus and 

 hyphsene fan-palms, the wild date, and the 

 "noble raphias, " the pandanus and dra- 

 cainas of the Zambezi delta or of inner 

 Congoland, the innumerable forest trees of 

 northern Zambezia and southern Congo- 

 land: all are illustrated in his pages by 

 well-chosen words and sometimes explana- 

 tory drawings ; and most are correctly 

 named, in contrast with the very unscien- 

 tific nomenclature of the generality of 

 travelers in his day. 



Livingstone notices as he descends the 

 slopes of the mountains towards the Cham- 

 bezi the abundance of the fig-tree which 

 yields the bark-cloth, so that the natives 

 eared little for the cotton cloths of Europe 

 and India. He also in this region observed 

 green mushrooms, which, on being peeled, 

 revealed a pink fleshy inside (the Visimha 

 of the natives). Only one or two of these 

 mushrooms were put into a wooden mortar 

 to flavor other and much larger kinds, the 

 w^iole being pounded up into a savory mess, 

 which was then cooked and eaten. But in 

 Livingstone's experience this mushroom 

 diet "only produced dreams of the by-gone 

 days, so that the saliva ran from the mouth 

 in these dreams and wetted the pillow." 

 The country on the Chambezi slope of these 

 Muchinga mountains was devoid of game, 

 the game having been killed out by far- 

 reaching and long-continued drives through 

 the hopo fences into pitfalls. 



He crossed Tanganyika to resume his 



