Royal Society of Edinburgh, 



307 



return to it, and this time in company with his old comrade and 

 brother-in-arms Captain Grant, and through toils and dangers 

 which men like these love almost for their own sake, they, together, 

 reached in 1861 the Victoria Lake, which Speke had discovered 

 three years earlier. 



It happened (and such coincidences are frequent in science) that 

 at tne very time when Speke and G-rant were fixing the bearings 

 and heights of the great lake and its mountains. Baron von Decken 

 and Mr Thornton measured and estimated the altitude of Kilima 

 Nearo, one of a mountain range to the eastward of our travellers' 

 route, at 20,000 feet, while the snow line descended below 16,000. 



At present our information is necessarily meagre, but on the 

 testimony of these two veteran travellers, furnished as they were 

 with instruments for observation, we have some actual certainty, 

 and room for infinite speculation. 



The Victoria Sea of fresh water is about 150 miles square. The 

 equator line runs through it, though nearer its north shore. Its 

 waters are 3563 feet above the sea level. It is skirted, if not quite 

 surrounded, by ranges of mountains of 10,000 feet high. Without 

 farther evidence, independent even of the high authority of Captain 

 Speke's opinion, we receive as certain that in the Victoria great 

 lake is the source, or rather the great reservoir of the Nile, for of 

 course the lake is fed by numerous streams, in fact by a stream 

 from every valley among the surrounding mountains, and then it 

 follows that the White Nile, not the Blue Nile as Bruce believed, 

 is the chief of the two streams that join at Kartom, lat. 15° 30'. 



Thus was the mystery cleared up that had defeated the ingenuity 

 and enterprise of philosophers and travellers, of kings and Ceesars, 

 since the days of Herodotus. 



Captain Speke thinks very highly of the country he has explored 

 in a commercial and agricultural view. He found the people not 

 all savage, but capable of intelligent interest and quite awake to 

 kindness and friendship. But the country is everywhere thinly 

 peopled, and productive much beyond the wants of the population. 

 Along the equator, at heights varying from 6000 to 12,000 feet, the 

 travellers found a delicious climate, with abundance of water, and no 

 excessive heat, full of cattle and corn. In the kingdom of Karagwe 

 (Lat. 1° 40', elevation 5100 feet), the temperature for five months 

 ranged from 60° to 70° at 9 morning. From what they could learn 

 of the country to the westward of the lake, it preserves the same 

 character for several hundred miles, and I know that Captain 

 Speke believes there is a continuance of that which he calls the 

 Fertile Zone almost to the coast of the Atlantic. He tells his 

 friends he has "discovered a great fertile zone there, caused princi- 

 pally by the Mountains of the Moon, situated close to the equator, 

 in the midst of the continent of Africa. These are great rain 

 condensers. Bound them are the sources of several rivers, the Nile 

 on one side, the Tanganyika and the Congo on the other. The 

 rains falling all round make that a fertile zone — the most fertile in 

 the world. There is nothing in India or China to equal it." 



