TRAVELS IN ABYSSINIA. 
of blame, if his mind was not very open to the 
nice train of investigation by which D'Anville 
Iiad proved, that the river visited by him had no 
claim to be considered as the Nile. This, how- 
ever, was an opinion, not a fact, and it cannot be 
wondered that Mr Bruce should have a pretty 
strong bias upon one side. It would appear by a 
notice of Mr Pinkerton, that the historian and 
geographer, neither of whom were much in the 
habit of tolerating opposite opinions, met at Paris, 
and that a violent collision took place. Several 
passages in Mr Bruce's writings bear traces of the 
profound indignation which he felt at this sup- 
posed attempt to rob him of his fame. It is re- 
markable, that he never makes the most distant 
allusion to the existence of any opinion different 
from his own ; which doubtless implies a certain 
degree of disingenuity. Yet the fact, that the 
Abiad, at the point of junction, is three times 
larger than the Azergue, is expressly stated in 
the printed text of his Travels, and it is one for 
which, so far as I know, we are exclusively in- 
debted to him. There is no small glory, I thinks 
in recording this fact, knowing it, as he did, to 
militate so strongly against his own most fondly 
cherished hypothesis. 
But this was not the only mortification which 
Mr Bruce had to encounter in returning to Eu- 
rope. The passage in Kircher, already noticed. 
