he world."

DAVID LIVINGSTONE.

1813-1873.

AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT.

BY CYRUS C. ADAMS.

Africa is the most ancient and the most recent conquest of the human
race. As far as the light of history can be projected into the past, we
see Egypt among the first and foremost on the threshold of civilization.
The continent discovered last and opened last to the enterprises of the
world is still Africa. Why is it that we see there both the dawn of
civilization and the tardiest development of human progress?

The reasons are not far to seek. The physical conformation of no other
continent is so unfavorable for exploration and development. Africa's
straight coast-lines, affording little shelter to the primitive ships of
early mariners, repelled the enterprising Phoenicians and other
seafarers in their eager search for new lands worth colonizing. Nor was
it easy for explorers to penetrate into the interior. In its surface
Africa has been compared to an inverted saucer,--the high plateaus
occupying most of the interior descending to the sea by short, abrupt,
and steep slopes, so that the wide and peaceful rivers of the plateaus
are lashed into foam as they approach the ocean by many series of rapids
and cataracts.

In all the other continents rivers have been the lines of least
resistance to the advance of man. Civilization has developed first along
the great rivers. The valleys were first settled, and up these valleys
man carried his industries and commerce far inland. Thus the Euphrates
and Tigris of Mesopotamia, the Ganges and Indus of India, and the Hoang
and Yangtse of China, were the creators of history; but this is true in
Africa only of the Nile. All the other rivers have been impediments
instead of helpful factors in the formidable task of exploration and
development.

The trying climate, also, gave Africa odious repute and delayed for
centuries the study and utilization of the continent. When the British
expedition under Captain Tuckey attempted to ascend the Congo, in 1816,
to see if it were really the lower part of the Niger River, as had been
conjectured, nearly all of its members perished miserably among the
rapids less than two hundred miles from the sea. Such tragedies as this
paralyzed enterprise in Africa until white men learned that the climate
was not so deadly, after all, if they adhered to the manner of life, the
hygienic rules, that should be observed in that tropical expanse.

In all the ot