1856-57.] FIRST VISIT HOME. 205 



of presenting a testimonial to Dr. Livingstone. It was 

 addressed by the Bishop of London, Mr. Raikes Currie, 

 and others. 



Meanwhile a sensible impulse was given to the scientific 

 enthusiasm for Livingstone by the arrival of the report 

 of a great meeting held in Africa itself, in honour of the 

 missionary explorer. At Cape Town, on 1 2th November 

 1856, His Excellency the Governor, Sir George Grey, the 

 Colonial Secretary, the Astronomer-Royal, the Attorney- 

 General, Mr. Rutherfoord, the Bishop, the Rev. Mr. 

 Thompson, and others, vied with each other hi expressing 

 their sense of Livingstone's character and work. The 

 testimony of the Astronomer-Royal to Livingstone's 

 eminence as an astronomical observer was even more 

 emphatic than Murchison's and Owen's to his attainments 

 in geography and natural history. Going over his whole 

 career, Mr. Maclear showed his unexampled achievements 

 in accurate lunar observation. " I never knew a man," 

 he said, " who, knowing scarcely anything of the method 

 of making geographical observations, or laying down 

 positions, became so soon an adept, that he could take 

 the complete lunar observation, and altitudes for time, 

 within fifteen minutes." His observations of the course 

 of the Zambesi, from Sesheke to its confluence with the 

 Lonta, were considered by the Astronomer-Royal to be 

 " the finest specimens of sound geographical observation 

 he ever met with." 



" To give an idea of the laboriousness of this branch of his work," 

 he adds, " on an average each lunar distance consists of five partial 

 observations, and there are 148 sets of distances, being 740 contacts, — 

 and there are two altitudes of each object before, and two after, which, 

 together with altitudes for time, amount to 2812 partial observations. 

 But that is not the whole of his observations. Some of them intrusted 

 to an Arab have not been received, and in reference to those trans- 

 mitted he says, ' I have taken others which I do not think it necessary 

 to send.' How completely all this stamps the impress of Livingstone 

 on the interior of South Africa ! . . . I say, what that man has 

 done is unprecedented. . . . You could go to any point across the 



