168 APPENDIX. 
mouth of the Mozambique Channel, the coast line is thickly 
planted with islands, reefs, and inlets affording harbours of 
the most advantageous description in regard to access, se - 
curity, and convenience; being in many instances natural 
inlets or straits of great variety, and in other instances the 
effect of the diffused and unrateable influence of the coral 
insects. Four or five important rivers also pierce the line of 
the eastern coast, and the confronting outline of Madagascar 
presents the same contrast to our impenetrable shores in the 
abundance and variety of its points of access and shelter. 
- 9. Over the whole of this section of the Indian Ocean there 
exist the remnants of Arabian and Portuguese influence 
lingering in isolated points upon the shore: the latter espe- 
cially now wasting from its own atrocious and inhospitable 
exercise. Humanity will certainly triumph in its extinction, 
if it be true that the cunning of its unhonoured decrepitude 
has been exercised in tempting, even recently, the native 
tribes to mutual slaughter, from zealous vexation at more 
philanthropic interference. Among the natives on the coast 
there appears great continuity of general character, aspect, 
and perhaps language, but the locality of identity or varia- 
tion remains yet to be ascertained, and a page in the history 
of man remains yet to be deciphered, containing the narra- 
tion or conjecture of what has occurred during the long ages 
in which the presence and the power of the civilized world 
has been excluded from these regions as rigidly as their 
shores have formed a barrier to the ocean. 
There is great want of a general knowledge of some good 
system (and there are several published) by which the 
sounds of one language may be represented by the charac- 
ters of another. ‘The confusion in the names of people and 
places in this continent is becoming somewhat puzzling. It 
is surely advisable to retain the spelling of names which 
