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of Edinburgh, Sessio7i 1863 - 64 . 
Zanzibar. The lake is narrow, but 800 miles long, and 1800 feet 
above the level of the sea. Very soon after. Captain Speke alone 
had the glory to see and bear witness to the great inland sea which 
he has named Victoria. Having only seen this mighty lake, and 
being obliged to leave it unexplored. Captain Speke made haste to 
return to it, and this time in company with his old comrade and 
brother-in-arms Captain G-rant, 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 the very time when Speke and Grant 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, wLile 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 C^sars, 
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 
