FAREWELL FESTIVAL. 269 



cal discoveries were made that place the name of Livingstone among the 

 foremost in that science — though harassed by every difficulty, enfeebled by 

 sickness and encompassed by dangers — in perils of swamps and waters, in 

 perils of noxious and destructive beasts, or of crafty and hostile men — yet no 

 phenomenon of nature, whether meteoric or living, appears to have escaped 

 the clear glance and self-possessed cognition of the determined explorer. 

 (Loud cheers.) 



" In regard to zoology, I must state that I never perused the work of any 

 traveller from which I had to take, from the same number of pages, so many 

 extracts of new and original notices of the living habits of rare animals, as 

 from the volume of African travels of which Mr. Murray now announces the 

 ' Thirtieth Thousand.' In this work the South African colonist and the 

 entomologist are alike benefited by the most precise and authentic evidence 

 yet obtained of the terrible tsetse-fly, and its fatal effects on the ox, horse, 

 dog, and other animals indispensable to colonising progress. The scientific 

 staff about to accompany Livingstone in his second exploration of the 

 Zambesi will doubtless, aided by his experience, clear up all the mystery 

 of this most extraordinary property attributed to an insect no bigger 

 than the house-fly. In the same unpretending volume we find a rich 

 store of new facts in natural history, told with the charm of direct transcript 

 from nature, and with the raciness of original power, and that humour which 

 is so often the concomitant of great and simple minds. In regard to the 

 singular economy of the ants and teremites, with what interest we read of the 

 unhooking of the wings by the insect itself after the nuptial flight, when the 

 bride, her one holiday excursion ended, lays down her ' limber fans ' of 

 glistening gauze, and betakes herself henceforth to the duties of domestic life, 

 — of the untiring activity of the workers, under the scorching sun, which 

 unweariedness the deep-thinking traveller illustrates by comparison with the 

 beating of the heart, perhaps unconscious of the profound physiological truth 

 embodied in this comparison of insect movements with the involuntary or 

 reflex muscular action in higher animals ! How mysterious seems that power 

 of most rapid diffusion of a subtle penetrating effluvium, which Livingstone 

 notices as the defence of certain ants, with experimental determinations of 

 distance and rate of progress of the emanation ! (Applause.) The same 

 faculty of exact inquiry is manifested in the experiments, which remind us of 

 those of Hunter — born, like Livingstone, in the parish of Kilbride — by which 

 our traveller determined the independent source of the fluid secretion of the 

 tree-insect, from which it dripped in such extraordinary quantity, both whilst 

 attached to the twig and when insulated from its sap- vessels. The ornitho- 

 logist has wondered at the seeming monstrous beaks of the hornbills, little 

 dreaming of that strange economy manifested in the voluntary imprisonment 

 of the incubating female, plastered up with her nest in the cleft of a tree, a 



