in'yassi: 



51 



snow is quite unknown.' And the author having 

 laid down his law bowed before it, and expected 

 Pact as well as the Public to do the same ; he 

 even attacked the text of Ptolemy, asserting that 

 the passages treating of the Nile sources and the 

 Lunar Mountains were an interpolation of a 

 comparatively recent date. In June and Novem- 

 ber 1863 the late Baron von der Decken, accom- 

 panied by Dr Kersten, an accomplished astrono- 

 mical observer, ascended some 1300 feet, saw a 

 clearly denned limit of perpetual snow at about 

 17,000 feet, and by a rough triangulation gave 

 the main peak of Kilima-njaro an elevation of 

 20,065 feet. Still Mr Cooley, with singular want 

 of candour, denied existence to the snow. It 

 was the same with his c Single Sea,' which under 

 the meaningless and erroneous name c N'yassi ' 

 again supplanted Ptolemy's Lakes, and this want 

 of acumen offered the last insult to African 

 geography. Thus was revived the day when the 

 Arab and Portuguese geographers made the three 

 Niles (of Egypt, Magadoxo, and Mgritia) issue 

 from one vast reservoir, and thus were the 

 school maps of the world disfigured during half 

 a generation. The lake also was painfully dis- 

 torted, simply that it might 6 run parallel to the 

 line of volcanic action drawn through the Isle de 



