1890.] Geography and Travel. 57 
General Notes. 
GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
Africa.—Notes Concerning Stanley.—A letter from H. M. 
Stanley, narrating the difficulties encountered by him in the ascent of 
the Aruwimi or Huri, and accompanied by a sketch map, appears in 
the May issue of the Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc. As the contents of this 
letter, the sufferings from hunger, insects, poisoned arrows and horrors 
of every kind, and the final triumph, are now well known, they will 
not here be recounted. Hejambi Rapids (about 27° 10’ E.) marks a 
division between two kinds of architecture and language. Below, 
the houses are conical ; above, the villages are long and straight, and 
the huts square and surrounded by tall logs which form separate courts. 
Huri is the most widely known native name for the Aruwimi. The 
Albert Nyanza seems to be growing smaller. Emin Pasha states that 
during “his acquaintance with it islands have become headlands. 
Near the south end the steamer has to anchor about five miles from 
shore. Thetribes of the forest and valley of the Huri are cannibals. 
Dwarf people, here called Wambutti, are numerous between the 
Hepoko and the grass-land, and are expert with their arrows. 
Dr. R. W. Felkin has examined some of the arrows with which the 
Tikki-Tikki attacked Stanley and his party, and finds that the latter’s 
idea that the poison is derived from ants is erroneous. The poison 
will kill in twenty minntes unless the antidote be used, and thus the 
deaths of Mr. Stanley’s men were due to tetanus, which in tropical 
. climates is often fatal to wounded men. The formic acid of ants, 
though an external irritant, is not a deadly poison. The poison used 
by the Tikki-Tikki is obtained from a tree which occurs both in Cen- 
tral Africa and on the east coast north of Mombasa. It is allied to the 
Strophanthus, but is more active and deadly. 
Wadai and Darfur.—The third part of Dr. Nachtigal’s work 
upon the Sahara and Sudan, dictated by the deceased traveler to a 
shorthand writer, has now been published by Mrs. Groddeck, to whom 
Dr. Nachtigal had confided its completion. One of the reasons which 
prevented Dr. Nachtigal from previously publishing it was his uncer- 
tainty regarding the Futa river, which he believed to be a continuation 
of the Welle, but purposed to settle the question in another expedition. 

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