rew, and then leaped overboard, and, though he
could swim well, pulled himself down, hand over hand, by the cable. His
body was never recovered.

From Mauritius Livingstone sailed for England, which he reached on the
12th of December, 1856--four and a half years after he had parted from
his family at Cape Town.

He was received with unwonted honors. The President of the Royal
Geographical Society, at a special meeting held to welcome him, formally
invited him to give to the world a narrative of his travels. Some
knavish booksellers paid him the less acceptable compliment of putting
forth spurious accounts of his adventures, one at least of which has
been republished in this country. Livingstone, so long accustomed to a
life of action, found the preparation of his book a harder task than he
had imagined. "I think," he says, "that I would rather cross the African
continent again than undertake to write another book." We trust that
he will yet do both. He would indeed have set out on another African
journey nearly a year ago to conduct his faithful Makololo attendants
back to their own country, had not the King of Portugal relieved him
from all anxiety on their account, by sending out directions that they
should be supported at Tete until his return.

Our abstract does, at best, but scanty justice to the most interesting,
as well as most valuable, of modern works of travel. It has
revolutionized our ideas of African character as well as of African
geography. It shows that Central Africa is peopled by tribes barbarous,
indeed, but far from manifesting those savage and degrading traits which
we are wont to associate with the negro race. In all his long pilgrimage
Livingstone saw scarcely a trace of the brutal rites and bloody
superstitions of Dahomey and Ashanti. The natives every where long for
intercourse with the whites, and eagerly seek the products of civilized
labor. In regions where no white men had ever been seen the cottons
of Lowell and Manchester, passed from tribe to tribe, are even now the
standard currency. Civilized nations have an equal interest in opening
intercourse with these countries, for they are capable of supplying
those great tropical staples which the industrious temperate zones must
have, but can not produce. Livingstone found cotton growing wild all
along his route from Loanda to Kilimane; the sugar-cane flourishes
spontaneously in the valley of "The River"; coffee abounds on the west
coast; an