xii INTRODUCTION. 



to Egypt, and employed him upon several diplomatic missions. 

 In March 1878, after Gordon Pasha had been appointed 

 Governor- General of the whole Sudan, Dr. Emin Effendi 

 received from him the appointment of Governor of the Equa- 

 torial Province, which post he has occupied up to the present 

 time." 



I must quote one more passage from the German Introduc- 

 tion, as it refers to Dr. E. Schnitzer's reason for adopting a 

 Turkish name, which proceeding appears to have greatly exer- 

 cised many people's minds : — 



" From the very first this determined man threw himself 

 heart and soul into his work, and as he sought a sphere of 

 labour amongst people of foreign customs and modes of 

 thought, he was perfectly willing to give up every external 

 indication which might stand in the way of his obtaining an 

 unhampered entrance into the Mohammedan world. Ear away 

 from large cities where, under the guise of fashion, European 

 habits ,are continually undermining the ancient and crum- 

 bling customs of Islam, and at the same time covering them 

 with a thick varnish, there obtains a certain distrust of a 

 solitary European, which prevents the intimate relation that 

 should charactei-ise the intercourse of a doctor with suffering 

 mankind. The German humanitarian believed it only possible 

 to fulfil his office satisfactorily by permitting no external 

 evidence of his Frankish origin to appear. The name he chose 

 for this purpose was Emin, ' the faithful one,' and certainly no 

 one has ever proved himself more worthy of bearing such a 

 name as the description of his character. It would no doubt 

 have been impossible for him to have done so much had he 

 retained his German name. An extraordinary gift for the 

 acquisition of foreign languages lightened his task, for, besides 

 German, French, English, and Italian, he mastered several 

 Slavonic languages, as well as Turkish and Arabic. He also 

 commenced to learn Persian, and who knows in how many 

 Central African dialects he may not be now at home ? 



