50 



MR COOLEY. 



The sceptics were headed by Mr W. D. Cooley, 

 who in 1854 had published his 6 Claudius Ptole- 

 my and the Nile.' He had identified the moun- 

 tain of Selene (ereX^) with the snowy highland 

 of 6 Semenai ' or ' Samien ' in northern Abyssinia, 

 and thus by adopting a mere verbal resemblance 

 he had obtained a system of truly ' lunatic moun- 

 tains.' Some years before (Journal Royal Geo- 

 graphical Society, vol. xv. 1845) appeared his 

 paper entitled, e The Geography of N'yassi, or the 

 great lake of Southern Africa investigated,' a 

 complicated misnomer. The article was written 

 in a clear style and a critical tone, showing am- 

 ple reading but lacking a solid foundation of fact. 

 It began as usual with Pigafetta and de Barros, 

 and it ended with Gamitto and Monteiro; the 

 peroration, headed 6 Harmony of Authorities,' was 

 a self-gratulation, a song of triumph concerning 

 the greatness of hypothetical discoveries, which 

 were soon proved to be purely fanciful. Not one 

 man in a million has the instincts of a good com- 

 parative geographer, and the author was assured- 

 ly not that exceptional man. His monograph 

 did good by awaking the scientific mind, but it 

 greatly injured popular geography. It unhap- 

 pily asserted (p. 15) that 6 in every part of east- 

 ern Africa to which our inquiries have extended, 



