May 24 , 1858 .] 
AFRICA— BARTH. 
319 
few paragraphs. The main physical features of the land he travelled 
in, and the principal geographical discoveries of himself and his 
coadjutors, are already known to us, and are incorporated into the 
popular geography of the day ; as, for example, the desert plateaux 
with their Alpine oases, the upper course of the Chadda-Benue, and 
the vast lagoons and floods of these central equatorial regions. For 
the rest, we are furnished with such a multiplicity of independent 
details, that broad, general views, calculated to convey a correct, 
though cursory knowledge of his labours in Northern Africa, can 
with difficulty be embraced on this occasion. He deals with ten 
or twelve distinct races, each unlike the rest in features, customs, 
and languages. We have to consider them as distributed into about 
as many nations, but in such a manner that the boundaries of their 
territories by no means coincide with the boundaries of the races ; 
and, in addition to this entanglement, we find large settlements or 
colonies of Fellatahs and of Tuaricks dispersed about the country, 
bearing relations of a most diverse and anomalous character, both 
to the government of the land they inhabit, and to that whence 
they migrated. 
The physical features of North Africa are equally various : a 
fertile band lies adjacent to the Mediterranean ; then comes a desert, 
studded with oases ; and, lastly, by a more or less gradual transition 
southwards, the scene is utterly changed, and an excessive drought 
and barrenness give place to the very opposite extreme of humidity 
and equatorial vegetation. Where, then, the kingdoms do not 
correspond with the races, and neither of them with the physical 
features of the soil ; where the state of society is in a constant flux 
of warfare and change, leaving few records of its transitions (and 
those of the most meagre description, dating back some to the 
times of the Boman empire, and others to the 10th, 12th, and 14th 
centuries), it is easy to conceive that a geographer like Barth, whose 
line of inquiry is eminently historical and social, and who is re- 
markable for the patient accumulative industry of his countrymen 
the Germans, should have gathered a mass of matter which his volu- 
minous publications appear insufficient to exhaust, and to which it 
is totally beyond my power to do justice in this Address. I 
am, however, convinced that there is no method of epitomising his 
labours so convenient as that of displaying them upon large maps, 
variously shaded and tinted, to show the races, nations, population, 
physical features of the country, and so forth ; such as those that 
were submitted by him at our last evening meeting. Those maps 
