nowledge of Africa
should increase so as to enable us to unravel the mystery of these
doubtful reports, to ascertain the degree of credit that is due to
these mysterious traditions. These desiderata, however, can hardly
201 be expected, whilst the present injudicious plans for the discovery
of Africa are persevered in. We must, if we desire to discover
effectually the hidden recesses and reported wonders of this
continent, adopt plans and schemes very different from any that
have hitherto been suggested; we must adopt _a grand system upon an
extensive scale_, a system directed and moved by a person competent
to so great an undertaking. The head or director of such an
expedition should be master of the general travelling and
trafficking language of Africa, the modern Arabic: he should
moreover be acquainted with the character of the people, their
habits, modes of life, religious prejudices, and fanaticism. A
grand plan, thus directed, could hardly fail to secure the command
of the commerce of Africa to Great Britain. Then the discovery of
the inmost recesses would follow the path of commerce, and that
continent, which has baffled the researches of the moderns as well
as of the ancients, would lay open its treasures to modern Europe,
and civilisation would be the natural result. Then would be the
period to attempt the conversion of the Negroes to Christianity;
and the standard of peace and good will towards men might be
successfully planted on the banks of the _Nile El Kabeer_, or _Nile
Assudan_, the Great Nile, or Nile of Sudan, or Nigritia, commonly
called the Niger.

[Footnote 146: Apollonius Rhodius calls these people [Greek:
emikuges] or half-dogs.]

[Footnote 147: The ingenious author of Philosophic Researches
concerning the Americans, speaking of a race which appear to
resemble the Acephali of Herodotus, or the race of men having
one eye, and that in their chest, says, "There is in Canibar a
race of savages who have hardly any neck, and whose shoulders
reach up to their ears. This monstrous appearance is
artificial, and to give it to their children they put enormous
weights upon their heads, so as to make the vertebrae of the
neck enter, if we may so say, the channel bone, (clavicule.)
Th