[ cxii ] 
APPENDIX. No. IV, 
Page xlix. 
Phe queslion regarding the termination of the Niger is one of the most 
doubtful and obscure in modern geography, and in the present defective state 
of our information with regard to the interior of Africa, seems hardly to admit 
of a clear and satisfactory solution. Of the difficulties'with which the subject 
is attended, some judgment may be formed from the various and even oppo- 
site opinions which have been maintained relative to the course of the Niger, 
since Park's discoveries have ascertained that it flows from west to east. As 
the enquiry is somewhat curious, a summary view of these different opinions, 
and of the principal arguments by which they are supported, may not be 
uninteresting to the readers of Park's life. To investigate the question with, 
the accuracy and minuteness which it deserves, would not only very far 
exceed the limits of a note, but would require much more information upon 
this subject than the editor possesses, united with some previous habits of 
geographical disquisition. 
I. According to the oldest of these opinions, and that which is supported 
by the greatest authorities (being the opinion not only of some of the prin- 
cipal Geographers of antiquity, but of D'Anville and Rennell among the 
moderns), it is supposed, that the Niger has an inland termination somewhere 
in the eastern part of Africa, probably in Wangara or Ghana: and that it is 
partly discharged into inland lakes, which have no communication with the 
sea, and partly spread over a wide extent of level country, and lost in sands 
or evaporated by the heat of the sun*. The principal ground of this suppo- 
sition is, the opinion of some of the best informed writers of antiquity on the 
geography of Africa, and a sort of general persuasion prevalent among the 
ancients to the same effect; circumstances, it must be acknowledged, of 
* Proceedings of the African Association, vol. i. p. 335. 
