X PREFACE. 
lected, the Author deems it of sufficient importance to make known to the 
public the extent to which discoveries have ah'eady been pushed into the 
southern part of the continent of Africa ; and from the intelHgence which 
is herein contained respecting the civilized Barroloos, he cannot suppress 
a hope that the African Association will be induced to prosecute their dis- 
coveries in Southern as well as Northern Africa, especially as the pos- 
session of the Cape holds out such great facilities for the undertaking. 
Here there are no inhuman and unrelenting Moors to oppose and harass 
the progress of the traveller ; he can here proceed without molestation 
over wide trackless plains as secure as they are solitary, and pass with equal 
security through a succession of mild and harmless inhabitants. And 
though Southern Africa boasts not of a Niger, it has its Gariep or Orange 
River, whose magnitude and known length of course are sufficiendy re- 
markable to make the source of the one an object of interest as well as 
the vent of the other. But, what is of much greater importance to hu- 
manity, the traveller will here have the satisfaction to find that, in the 
interior and central parts of the southern continent, a state of slavery is 
not the predestined and inevitable lot of the native African. He may here 
likewise promise to himself a constant succession of new objects, in every 
branch of natural history. It was a common observation among the 
Romans, which they borrowed from the Greeks, that " Africa always 
" affords something new the justness of which, as the late journey suffi- 
ciently proves, holds good in our own times. In fact, the geography, the na- 
tural productions, and the various tribes of natives inhabiting the interior 
parts of this great continent may yet be considered as unknown ; and con- 
sequently a wide field is here presented for the researches of the inquisitive 
;and philosophical traveller. Little was it suspected that at no greater 
distance from the southern angle of Africa (which has now been colonized 
near two hundred years) than seven hundred miles, and not more than 
three hundred miles from the skirts of the Cape settlement, a tribe of 
natives should for the first time have been discovered (for nothing was 
known of them but from vague report) within the last five years : — a 
people living together in large societies, in peace, security, and happiness ; 
