2m 



SCIENCE, 



[Vol. IV., No. 85. 



of government, and religious belief, not to speak of 

 their curious language. I am happy to say that I 

 have been able to determine the latitude of all points 

 of interest by astronomical observations, as well as 

 the longitude of Baringo and Kwa-Sunda near the 

 Nyanza. The height of all main points has been 

 determined by George's barometer. 



"My route was from Baringo to near the Nile, 

 almost due west, returning somewhat farther north. 

 Kavisondo does not extend so far south, not more 

 than 20' south. The north-east corner of the lake, 

 as represented on the maps, must be cut off if my 

 observations are correct." A spirited discussion en- 

 sued, in the course of which it appeared that Mr. 

 Thomson had had some hairbreadth escapes, and 

 had endured the extremity of hunger. Professor 

 Ravenstein gave a description of the physical con- 

 formation of equatorial Africa, and said that the 

 Masai were no new race, but had been met with 

 before. He instanced the Latooka of Sir Samuel 

 Baker, and M'te'sa, the chief of Uganda, and quon- 

 dam convert of Stanley, as belonging to the same 

 group. 



The president made a communication with regard 

 to Mr. H. H. Johnson's Kilitna-njaro expedition, to 

 the effect that he had been well received by the 

 ruler of the district, 'King Mandalla,' and had been 

 given every facility for the prosecution of his work 

 of collecting specimens of natural history. 



Prof. E. G. Ravenstein, the recorder of the sec- 

 tion, read an exceedingly interesting paper on certain 

 maps and globes of Central Africa before the seven- 

 teenth century, which exhibited a complicated river 

 system and a congerie of lakes. It had been sup- 

 posed by certain geographers of eminence, including 

 Mr. Major, that the hydrographical features were 

 derived from actual knowledge obtained by the Portu- 

 guese, who had thus anticipated Livingstone, Cam- 

 eron, and Stanley by a couple of centuries. But this 

 was not a correct idea; as the learned Ludolfus — 

 if he had carried out his intention of compiling a 

 map of the whole of Africa — would have shown, 

 and would thus have gained a place among cartog- 

 raphers second only to Delisle and D'Anville. 



In order to judge how far these ancient maps were 

 based upon actual knowledge, or were merely con- 

 jectural, it would be necessary to examine the rec- 

 ords of early exploration; and, fortunately, we are 

 now in a position to do this, as Luciano Cordeiro had 

 brought to light several of the most ancient Portu- 

 guese records. 



After a concise account of the explorations of the 

 ancients, Mr. Ravenstein narrated, at some length, 

 the exploration carried on by the Portuguese. He 

 said that their knowledge of the coast districts was 

 pretty full ; and as early as the sixteenth century 

 they had heard of the Makoko, the great chief of 

 the Anteke, as well as of several tribes on the middle 

 Kongo, of the Zambeze as far as Chicova, and of a 

 considerable portion of Abyssinia. Inland lakes 

 were mentioned by them, but in so vague a way that 

 their identification with our modern lakes was impos- 

 sible. Even the Nyassa seems to have been unknown 



to them, although merchants from Sena navigated 

 the Shir6; and an overland trade was undoubtedly 

 carried on by the natives, for articles of Portuguese 

 manufacture actually reached Manica overland from 

 Loanda. But no Portuguese had ever crossed the 

 continent ; as Gregorio Quadra and Balthazar Rebello 

 de Aragao, who attempted to do so in 1520 and 1602, 

 had failed at the very outset. 



With regard to the ancient maps, he stated that the 

 earliest among them were mere repetitions — so far 

 as the interior was concerned — of Ptolemy. Later 

 on, the remarkable information given by Fra Mauro 

 on Abyssinia was embodied in them. Ruysch's map 

 (1508) is an illustration of Ptolemy; and if we took 

 the more detailed maps of the period, — Pigafetta, 

 illustrative of the 'Congo,' for instance, — and trans-' 

 f erred the names there found to their correct posi- 

 tion, we should find that the interior of Africa was 

 a blank. As an example, Barcena, Coloes (from 

 Ptolemy), Zahaf, and Saphat were names all refer- 

 ring to the great lake of Abyssinia, our Lake Tsana. 



It followed from this, that, up to the beginning of 

 the seventeenth century, the Portuguese had no 

 knowledge of the centre of Africa and of its great 

 river-systems ; although subsequently they had made 

 certain discoveries which anticipated, in a measure, 

 the information obtained by the heroes of modern 

 African exploration. 



Mr. Trelawney Saunders described the remarkable 

 journey of a trained native of India — Krishna, or 

 A. K., as he is more commonly called — who pene- 

 trated regions hitherto known to us only through 

 D'Anville's Atlas de la Chine, which contains maps 

 of Tibet, derived from the surveys of Lama priests, 

 made in continuation of the great Jesuit work, under 

 the orders of the famous emperor Kuenten. It has 

 been all along a most interesting feature of the re- 

 searches of the native explorers in Tibet, that they 

 have, in a remarkable degree, confirmed these Tibetian 

 surveys, allowing some little differences easily rec- 

 ognized. In the present case the explorer, leaving 

 Prjevalski's route at a point near the source of the 

 Hoangho, struck a river, which, on placing a reduc- 

 tion of his work upon a reduction of the Lama survey, 

 on the same projection and scale, falls exactly, with- 

 out any exaggeration, upon the course of the Murus 

 Ussu, or upper waters of the great river Yang-tse- 

 Kiang. Nevertheless, the conclusions adopted in 

 Calcutta make this river to be the Yalung, one of the 

 great affluents of the Yang-tse-Kiang. 



After some little discussion of a rather desultory 

 nature, — in the course of which Mr. Gordon, an 

 engineer who has travelled extensively in India, as- 

 serted that the country on the Bacco, where about six 

 hundred inches of rain fall in a year, was the rainiest 

 in the world, — Mr. Saunders described the first gen- 

 eral census of India, which was taken on Feb. 17, 1881. 

 The entire population enumerated was 253,891,821, 

 occupying an area of 1,382,624 square miles. He 

 then compared various parts of this large population 

 with that of other countries chiefly European, and 

 described the Indian house and its contents. This 

 census, which is embodied in twenty folio volumes.. 



