Notes on the Congo River . 165 
carriere que I'intirieury laissait prendre ” (“Mem. 
de l’Acad. des Inscriptions,” xxvi. 61), had not 
been subjected to scientific analysis ; this was 
reserved for the Presidential Address to the Royal 
Geographical Society by the late Sir R. I. Mur¬ 
chison, 1852. Geographers did’ not see how to 
pass the Niger through the “ Kong Mountains, 
which, uniting with the Jebel Komri, are sup¬ 
posed to run in one unbroken chain across the 
continent; ” and these Lunar Mountains of the 
Moslems, which were “ stretched like a chaplet of 
beads from east to west,” undoubtedly express, 
as M. du Chaillu contends, a real feature, the 
double versant, probably a mere wave of ground 
between the great hydrographic basins of the 
Niger and the Congo, of North Africa and of 
Central Africa. Men still wasted their vigour 
upon the Nigritis Palus, the Chelonfdes waters, 
the Mount Caphas, and the lakes of Wangara, 
variously written Vancara and Vongara, not to 
mention other ways. Maps place “Wangara” to 
the north-west of Dahome, where the natives 
utterly ignore the name. Dupuis (“Ashantee,” 
1824) suggests that, like “Takrur,” it is an 
obsolete Moslem term for the 660 miles of mari¬ 
time region between Cape Lahu and the Rio 
Formoso or the Old Calabar River. This would 
include the three despotisms, Ashanti, Dahome, 
and Benin, with the tribes who, from a distance of 
