tationary or
have been upheaved.

The chronometrical measurements were completed in the Indian Ocean by a
visit to Mauritius, and thence, voyaging around the Cape of Good Hope,
to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension, in the Southern Atlantic,
and to the mainland of Brazil at Bahia and Pernambuco, from which the
course was set for home. The Beagle made the shores of England at
Falmouth on October 2, 1836, after an absence of nearly five years.

On a retrospect, among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind,
including the spectacles of the Southern Cross, the Cloud of Magellan,
and the other constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, the glacier
leading its blue stream of ice overhanging the sea in a bold precipice,
the lagoon-islands raised by the reef-building corals, the active
volcano, the overwhelming effects of a violent earthquake--none exceed
in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man, whether
those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of
Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled
with the varied productions of the God of nature. No one can stand in
those solitudes unmoved and not feel that there is more in man than the
mere breath of his body. And so with the boundless plains of Patagonia,
or when looking from the highest crest of the Cordilleras, the mind is
filled with the stupendous dimensions of the surrounding masses.

FELIX DUBOIS

Timbuctoo the Mysterious

_I.--From Paris to the Niger_

Felix Dubois has a considerable reputation in France and
on the European Continent generally as an African
explorer. His sphere of travel has been confined to the
Dark Continent north of the Equator. He first published in
1894 "Life on the Black Continent," but his reputation
rests mainly on "Timbuctoo the Mysterious," issued in
1897, of which two English translations have appeared.
Dubois' style is vivacious and picturesque, with a vein of
poetic feeling in some passages. His "Early History of
Northern Africa and Timbuctoo," of the architecture of
which he has made a special study, is lucid; but in
discussing the extension of the British and French spheres
of influence and protectorates during the past century he
betrays a certain measure of Gallic Anglophobia.

Having fallen asleep in a railway carriage on your departure from Paris,
you awake six weeks later on a canoe-barge upon the Niger.