54 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XV. No, 364 



Thus this expedition has enabled us to form clearer notions of 

 the hydrography of this remarkable region of rivers. We see that 

 the sources of the Kongo and the Nile lie almost within a few 

 yards of each other. Indeed, so difficult is it to determine to which 

 river the various waters in this region send their tribute, that Mr. 

 Stanley himself, in his first letter, was confident that the southern 

 Lake Albert belonged to the Kongo, and not to the Nile system ; 

 it was only actual inspection that convinced him he was mistaken. 

 How it is that the Ituri or the Aruvimi and other rivers in the 

 same region are attracted to^the Kongo and not to the Nile is easi- 

 ly seen from Mr. Stanley's graphic description of the lay of the 

 country between the Kongo and the Albert Nyanza'. It is, he 

 says, like the glacis of a fort, some 350 miles long, sloping gradu- 

 ally up from the margin of the Kongo (itself at the Aruvimi mouth 

 1,400 feet above the sea), until ten minutes beyond one of the Ituri 

 feeders it reaches a height of 5,200 feet, to descend almost perpen- 

 dicularly 2,900 feet to the surface of the lake, which forms the great 

 western .reservoir of the Nile. 



But when the term " glacis " is used, it must not be inferred that 

 the ascent from the Kongo to Lake Albert is smooth and unob- 

 structed. The fact is that Mr. Stanley found himself involved in 

 the northern section of what is probably the most extensive and 

 densest forest region in Africa. Livingstone spent many a weary 

 day trudging its gloomy recesses away south at Nyangwe on the 

 Lualaba. It stretches for many miles north to the Monbuttu 

 country. Stanley entered it at Yambuya, and tunnelled his way 

 through it to within fifty miles of the Albert Nyanza, when it all of 

 a sudden ceased and gave way to grassy plains and the unob- 

 structed light of day. How far west it may extend beyond the 

 Aruvimi he cannot say ; but it was probably another section of 

 this same forest region that Mr. Paul du Chaillu struck some thirty 

 years ago, when gorilla-hunting in the Gaboon. Mr. Stanley esti- 

 mates the area of this great forest region at about three hundred 

 thousand square miles, which is more likely to be under than over 

 the mark. The typical African forest, as Mr. Drummond shows 

 in his charming book on " Tropical Africa," is not of the kind 

 found on the Aruvimi, which is much more South American than 

 African. Not even in the " great sponge " from which the Zam- 

 besi and the Kongo draw their remote supplies do we meet with 

 such impenetrable density. Trees scattered about as in an English 

 park in small open clumps form, as a rule, the type of " forest " 

 common in A.frica ; the physical causes which led to the dense 

 packing of trees over the immense area between the Kongo and 

 Nile lakes will form an interesting investigation. Mr. Stanley's 

 description of the great forest region, in his letter to Mr. Bruce, 

 is well worth quoting : — 



" Take a thick Scottish copse, dripping with rain ; imagine this 

 copse to be a mere undergrowth, nourished under the impene- 

 trable shade of ancient trees, ranging from 100 to 1 80 feet high; 

 briers and thorns abundant ; lazy creeks meandering through the 

 depths of the jungle, and sometimes a deep affluent of a great 

 river. Imagine this forest and jungle in all stages of decay and 

 growth — old trees falling, leaning perilously over, fallen prostrate ; 

 ants and insects of all kinds, sizes, and colors murmuring around ; 

 monkeys and chimpanzees above, queer noises of birds and animals, 

 crashes in the jungle as troops of elephants rush away ; dwarfs 

 with poisoned arrows securely hidden behind some buttress or in 

 some dark recess ; strong, brown-bodied aborigines with terribly 

 sharp spears, standing poised, still as dead stumps ; rain pattering 

 down on you every other day in the year ; an impure atmosphere, 

 with its dread consequences, fever and dysentery ; gloom through- 

 out the day, and darkness almost palpable throughout the night ; 

 and then if you will imagine such a forest extending the entire dis- 

 tance from Plymouth to Peterhead, you will have a fair idea of some 

 of the inconvenience endured by us from June 28 to Dec. 5, 1887, 

 and from June i, 1888, to the present date, to continue again from 

 the present date till about Dec. 10, 1888, when I hope then to say 

 a last farewell to the Kongo Forest." 



Mr. Stanley tries to account for this great forest region by the 

 abundance of moisture carried over the continent from the wide 

 Atlantic by the winds which blow landward through a great part 

 of the year. But it is to be feared the remarkable phenomenon is 

 not to be accounted for in so easy a way. Investigation may prove 



that the rain of the rainiest region in Africa comes not from the 

 Atlantic, but the Indian Ocean, with its moisture-laden monsoons. 

 And so we should have here a case analogous to that which occurs 

 in South America, the forests of which resemble in many features 

 those of the region through which Mr. Stanley has passed. 



But the forest itself is not more interesting than its human deni- 

 zens. The banks of the river in many places are studded with 

 large villages, some, at least, of the native tribes being cannibals. 

 We are here on the northern border of the true negro peoples, so 

 that when the subject is investigated the Aruvimi savages may be 

 found to be much mixed. But unless Europe promptly intervenes, 

 there will shortly be few people left in these forests to investigate. 

 Mr. Stanley came upon two slave-hunting parties, both of them 

 manned by the merciless people of Manyuema. Already great 

 tracts have been turned into a wilderness, and thousands of the 

 natives driven from their homes. From the ethnologist's point of 

 view the most interesting inhabitants of the Aruvimi forests are 

 the hostile and cunning dwarfs, or rather pygmies, who caused the 

 expedition so much trouble. No doubt they are the same as the 

 Monbuttu pygmies found farther north, and essentially similar to 

 the pygmy population found scattered all over Africa, from the 

 Zambesi to the Nile, and from the Gaboon to the east coast. Mr. 

 Du Chaillu found them in the forests of the west thirty years ago, 

 and away south on the great Sankuru tributary of the Kongo- 

 Major Wissmann and his fellow-explorers met them within the 

 past few years. They seem to be the remnants of a primitive 

 population rather than stunted examples of the normal negro.. 

 Around the villages in the forest, wherever clearings had been 

 made, the ground was of the richest character, growing crops of 

 all kinds. Mr. Stanley has always maintained that .in the high 

 lands around the great lakes will be found the most favorable re- 

 gion for European enterprise ; and if in time much of the forest is^ 

 cleared away, the country betvi'een the Kongo and Lake Albert 

 might become the granary of Africa. 



To the geographer, however, the second half of the expedition's 

 work is fuller of interest than the first. Some curious problems 

 had to be solved in the lake region, problems that have given rise 

 to much discussion. When in 1864 Sir Samuel Baker stood on the 

 lofty escarpment that looks down on the east shore of the Albert 

 Nyanza, at Vacovia, the lake seemed to him to stretch inimitably 

 to the south, so that for long it appeared on our maps as extend- 

 ing beyond 1° south latitude. When Stanley, many years later,, 

 on his first great expedition, after crossing from Uganda, came 

 upon a great bay of water, he was naturally inclined to think that 

 it was a part of Baker's lake, and called it Beatrice Gulf. But 

 Gessi and Mason, members of Gordon Pacha's staff, circumnavi- 

 gated the lake later on, and found, that it ended more than a degree 

 north of the equator. So when Stanley published his narrative he 

 made his " Beatrice Gulf " a separate lake lying to the south of the 

 Albert Nyanza. Mr. Stanley saw only a small portion of the south- 

 ern lake, Muta Nzige, but in time it expanded and expanded on 

 our maps, until there seemed some danger of its being joined on to 

 Lake Tanganyika. Emin himself, during his twelve years' stay in 

 the Sudan, did something towards exploring the Albert Nyanza, 

 and found that its southern shore was fast advancing northwards, 

 partly owing to sediment brought down by a river, and partly due 

 to the wearing away of the rocky bed of the Upper Nile, by which 

 much water escaped, and the level of the lake subsided. Thus, 

 when Baker stood on the shore of the lake in 1864, it may well 

 have extended many miles farther south than it does now. But 

 where did the river come from that Mason and Emin saw running 

 into the lake from the south ? As was "pointed out above, Stanley 

 at first thought it could not come from his own lake to the south, 

 which he believed must send its waters to the Kongo. But all 

 controversy has now been ended. During the famous exodus of 

 the fifteen hundred from Kavalli to the coast, the intensely inter- 

 esting country lying between the northern lake, Albert, and the 

 southern lake, now named Albert Edward, was traversed. Great 

 white grassy plains stretch away south from the shores of Lake 

 Albert, which under the glitter of a tropical sun might well be 

 mistaken for water; evidently they have been under water at a 

 quite recent period. But soon the country begins to rise, and 

 round the base of a great mountain boss the river Semliki winds 



