baker’s mistake. 
551 
the great valley, and there found lacustrine rivers amply 
sufficient to account for the Nile and ail its phenomena. 
The next explorer, Baker, believed as honestly as Speke 
and Grant that in the Lake River Albert he had a second 
source of the Nile to that of Speke. He came further up 
the Nile than any other in modern times, but turned when 
between six hundred and seven hundred miles short of the 
Caput Nili. He is now employed in a more noble work 
than the discovery of the Nile sources ; and if, as all must 
earnestly wish, he succeeds in suppressing the Nile slave- 
trade, the boon he will bestow on humanity will be of far 
higher value than all my sources together. 
When intelligent men like these and Bruce have been 
mistaken, I have naturally felt anxious that no one should 
come after me and find sources south of mine, which I now 
think can only be possible by water running up the south- 
ern slope of the watershed. 
But all that can in modern times and in common modesty 
be fairly claimed is the rediscovery of what had been sunk 
into oblivion, like the circumnavigation of Africa by the 
Phoenician admirals of one of the Pharaohs about b. o. 
600. He was not believed, because he reported that in 
passing round Libya he had the sun on his right hand. 
This to us, who have gone round the Cape from east to west 
stamps his tale as genuine. 
The predecessors of Ptolemy probably gained their in- 
formation from men who visited this very region, for in the 
second century of our era he gave in substance what we 
now find to be genuine geography. 
The springs of the Nile, rising in ten degrees to twelve 
degrees south latitude, and their waters collecting into two 
large lacustrine rivers, and other facts, could have been 
learned only' from primitive travellers or traders — the true 
discoverers of what emperors, kings, philosophers, all the 
great minds of antiquity longed to know, and longed in 
vain. 
In a letter of November 1870, now enclosed, I have tried 
