EARLY MODERN IDEAS, 
401 
missionaries. The only cause which it seems possi- 
ble to assign is, that, as they followed a very ir- 
regular and winding course, for the purpose of 
visiting, sometimes their own scattered establish- 
ments, sometimes the court of the king or princi- 
pal lords, their unskilfulness might lead them to 
extend, in a straight line, the whole of this de- 
vious tract ; which, combined with the natural 
propensity to magnify their own deeds, might 
lead to this enormous amplification. The Nile 
was also made to issue from the northern side of 
the lake, so that all the windings of its semicir- 
cular sweep round Gojam, were extended in a 
straight line from south to north. This immense 
extension of Abyssinia brought it to the frontier 
of Congo, without the latter making a step to 
meet it. The magnitude of Congo, in fact, is 
scarcely at all exaggerated ; a very rare case in 
such circumstances, and which, perhaps, could 
only have happened, because geographers found 
the interior so blocked up by Abyssinia, that they 
had not space in which to exaggerate. The river 
Congo, in particular, by being derived from this 
much misplaced site of the Dembea, had a course 
assigned to it, totally inadequate to their own mag- 
nificent descriptions of its magnitude. 
In regard to the modern geography of Western 
Africa, as it hinges almost entirely upon the 
course of the Niger, which forms the subject of 
VOL. II. c c 
