INTRODUCTION. 
91 
wall of trass. “ Hitter slialt thou come, but no 
further,” with safety or comfort to thyself. This 
command, although not pronounced, is a part of the 
natural instinct of every animal in a state of nature. 
Domestication can do much, but its effect is almost 
entirely limited to those animals which have been 
marked out by our Creator as destined to the ser- 
vice of man. Let him be thankful for these excep- 
tions, and not, with a modem philosopher, idly boast 
of “ man's conquest of nature when his highest 
faculties cannot domesticate — a worm ! 
Of all the zoological provinces into which our 
globe is divided, Africa is the most unexplored. The 
land thirsty and desolate — the people savage and 
idolatrous — the climate burning and pestilential; 
we trace all that can impede and resist civilization, 
and the prosecution of research. The interior of 
Africa is like the fabled upas-tree of Java ; and of 
nearly all those adventurous spirits who have set 
out to gather its fruits, nothing remains but their 
whitened bones. The zoology of Africa is even less 
known than its geography. Its coasts, at least 
throughout its circumference, have been traced out 
by navigators ; but the natural history of only two 
or three insignificant parts, when compared to the 
whole, has been investigated j while of the vast 
regions intervening between these distant spots, we 
know little or nothing. The ornithology of Egypt 
was well explored in the direction of the march of 
the French army, by the inimitable Savigny, and 
those learned men who accompanied it ; Euppell 
