vation. The slave-trade is the gigantic evil which meets us at every step in the country. We cannot move through any part without meeting captured men and women, bound, and sometimes gagged; so no good can be done if this crying evil is not grappled with. The good bishop had some 200 people entirely at his disposal, and would soon have presented to the country an example of a free community, supported by its own industry, where fair dealing could be met, which undoubtedly would have created immense influence; for wherever the English name is known it is associated with freedom and fair play. Some seem to take a pleasure in running down their fellow-countrymen; but the longer I live, I like them the better. They carry with them some sense of law and justice, and a spirit of kindliness; and were I in a difficulty, I should prefer going to an Englishman rather than to any other for aid. And as for Englishwomen, they do, undoubt edly, make the best wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters in the world. It is this conviction that makes me, in my desire to see slavery abolished, and human happiness promoted, ardently wish to have some of our countrywomen transplanted to a region where they would both give and receive benefit, where every decent Christian Englishman, whether churchman or dissenter, learned or unlearned, liberal or bigoted, would certainly become a blessing by introducing a better system than that which has prevailed for ages. We conducted Bishop Mackenize and party up to the highlands, and after spending three or four days with them, returned, and never had any more connection with the conduct of that mission. We carried a boat past Murchison's Cataracts. By these the river descends at different leaps of great beauty, 1,200 feet in a distance of about 40 miles. Above that we have sixty miles of fine deep rivers, flowing placidly out of Lake Nyassa. As we sailed into this fine freshwater lake, we were naturally anxious to know its depth-ten, twelve, twenty, thirty fathomsthen no bottom with all our line; and John Neill, our sailor, at last pronounced it fit for the Great Eastern to sail in. We touched the bottom in a bay with a line of 100 fathoms, and a mile out could find no bottom at 116 fathoms. It contains plenty of fish, and great numbers of natives daily engage in catching them with nets, hooks, spears, torches, and poison. The water remains at 72°, and the crocodiles having plenty of fish to eat rarely attack men. It is from fifty to sixty miles broad, and we saw at least 225 miles of its length. As seen from the lake, it seems surrounded by moun

tains, and from these furious storms come suddenly down and raise high seas, which are dangerous for a boat, but the native canoes are formed so as to go easily along the surface. The apparent mountains on the west were ascended last year, and found to be only the edges of a great plateau, 3,000 feet above the sea. This is cool, well watered, and well peopled with the Manganja and the Maori, some of whom possess cattle; and I have no doubt but that, the first hardships over, and properly housed and fed, Europeans would enjoy life and comfort. This part of Africa has exactly the same form as Western India at Bombay, only this is a little higher and cooler. Well, having now a fair way into the highlands by means of the Zambesi and Shire, and a navigable course of river and lake, of two miles across, which all the slaves from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, as well as some for Cuba took, and nearly all the inhabitants of this densely-peopled country actually knowing how to cultivate cotton, it seemed likely that their strong propensity to trade might be easily turned to the advantage of our own country as well as theirs. And here I beg to remark that on my first journey, my attention not having then been turned to the subject, I noticed only a few cases of its cultivation, but on this I saw much more than I had previously any idea of. The cotton is short in the staple, strong, and like wool in the hand-as good as upland American. A second variety has been introduced, as is seen in the name, being foreign cotton, and a third of very superior quality, very long in the fibre, though usually believed to belong to South America, was found right in the middle of the continent in the country of the Makololo. A tree of it was eight inches in diameter, or like an ordinary apple-tree. And all these require planting not oftener than once in three years. There is no danger of frosts, either, to injure the crops. No sooner, however, had we begun our labors among the Manganja than the African Portuguese, by instigating the Ajawa, with arms and ammunition, to be paid for in slaves, produced the utmost confusion. Village after village was attacked and burnt; for the Manganja, armed only with bows and arrows, could not stand before firearms. The bowman's way of fighting is to be in ambush, and to shoot his arrows unawares, while those with guns, making a great noise, cause the bowmen to run away. The women and children become captives. This process of slave-hunting went on for some months, and then a panic seized the Manganja nation. All fled down to the river, only anxious to get that between them and their enemies; but they had left all

their food behind them, and starvation of thousands ensued. The Shire valley, where thousands lived, at our first visit was converted literally into a valley of dry bones. One cannot now walk a mile without seeing a human skeleton; open a hut in the now deserted villages, and there lie the unburied skeletons. In some I opened, there were two skeletons; and a little one, rolled up in a mat, between them. I have always hated putting the blame of being baffled upon any one else, from a conviction that a man ought to succeed in all feasible projects, in spite of everybody; and, more over, I wish not to be understood as casting a slur upon the Portuguese in Europe, for the Viscount Lavaidio, the Viscount de la Bandeira, and others, are as anxious to see the abolition of the slave-trade as could be desired; but the evil is done by the assertion in Europe of dominion in Africa, when it is quite well know that the Portuguese in Africa were only a few half-castes, the children of converts and black women, who have actually to pay tribute to the pure natives. Were they of the smallest benefit to Portugal? If any one ever made a fortune and went home to spend it in Lisbon; or if any pleasure whatever could be derived by the Portuguese government from spending £5000 annually on needy governors, who all connive at the slave-trade, the thing could be understood. But Portugal gains nothing but a shocking bad name, as the first that began the slave-trade, and the last to end it. To us it is a serious matter to see Lord Palmerston's policy, which has been so eminently successful on the west, so largely neutralised on the east coast. A great nation like ours cannot get rid of the obligations to other members of the great community of nations. The police of the sea must be maintained; and should we send no more cruisers to suppress the slave-trade, we would soon be obliged to send them to suppress piracy, for no traffic engenders lawlessness as does this odious trade. The plan I propose required a steamer on Lake Nyassa to take up the ivorytrade, as it is by the aid of that trade that the traffic in slaves is carried on. The Government sent out a steamer, which, though an excellent one, was too deep for the Shire. Another steamer was then built at my own expense; this was all that could be desired, made to unscrew into twenty-four pieces, and the Lady Nyassa, or Lady of the Lake, was actually unscrewed and ready for conveyance to the scene of the missionary work, but that must be done by younger men, specially educated for it-men willing to rough it, and yet hold quietly and patiently on. When I became Consul, it

was with the confident hope that I should carry out this work, and I do not mean to give it up. If being baffled had ever made me lose heart, I should never have been here in the position which by your kindness I now occupy. I intend to make another attempt, but this time to the north of the Portuguese territory; and I feel greatly encouraged by the interest you show, as it cannot be for the person, but from your sympathy for the cause of human liberty; for it startles us to see a great nation of our own blood despising the African's claims to humanity, and drifting helplessly into a war about him, and then drifting quite as helplessly into abolition and slavery principles; then, leading the Africans to fight. No mighty event like this terrible war ever took place without teaching terrible lessons. One of these may be that, though on the side of the oppressor there is power, there be higher than they." With respect to the African, neither drink, nor disease, nor slavery can root him out of the world. I never had any idea of the prodigious destruction of human life that takes place subsequently to the slave-hunting, till I saw it; and as this has gone on for centuries, it gives a wonderful idea of the vitality of the nation.

EXTRACTS FROM THE ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT,

SIR CHARLES LYELL, D.C,L., F.R.S.

Gentlemen of the British Association,-The place where we have been invited this year to hold our thirty-fourth meeting is one of no ordinary interest to the cultivators of physical science. It might have been selected by my fellow-laborers in geology as a central point of observation, from which, by short excursi ns to the east and west, they might examine those rocks which constitute, on the one side, the more modern, and on other the more ancient records of the past, while around them and at their feet lie monuments of the middle period of the earth's history. But there are other sites in England which might successfully compete with Bath as good surveying stations for the geologist. What renders Bath a peculiar point of attraction to the student of natural phenomena is its thermal and mineral waters, to the sanatory powers of which the city has owed its origin and celebrity. The great volume and high temperature of these waters render them not only unique in our island, but perhaps without a paralled in the rest of Europe, when we duly take into account their distance from the nearest region of violent earthquakes or of active or extinct volcanoes. The

VOL. I.

ДА

No. 5

spot where they issue, as we learn from the researches of the historian and antiquary, was lonely and desert when the Romans first landed in this island, but in a few years it was converted into one of the chief cities of the newly conquered province. On the site of the hot-springs was a large morass from which clouds of white vapor rose into the air; and there first was the spacious bath-room built, in a highly ornamental style of architecture, and decorated with columns, pilasters, and tessellated pavements. By its side was erected a splendid temple dedicated to Minerva, of which some statues and altars with their inscriptions, and ornate pillars, are still to be seen in the Muscum of this place. To these edifices the quarters of the garrison, and in the course of time the dwellings of new settlers, were added; and they were all encircled by a massive wall, the solid foundations of which still remain.

A dense mass of soil and rubbish, from 10 to 20 feet thick, now separates the level on which the present city stands from the level of the ancient Aqua Solis of the Romans. Digging through this mass of heterogeneous materials, coins and coffins of the Saxon period have been found; and lower down, beginning at the depth of from 12 to 15 feet from the surface, coins have been disinterred of Imperial Rome, bearing dates from the reign of Claudius to that of Maximus in the fifth century. Beneath the whole are occasionally seen tessellated pavements still retaining their bright colors; one of which, on the site of the Mineral-water Hospital, is still carefully preserved, affording us an opportunity of gauging the difference of level of ancient and modern Bath.

On the slopes and summits of the picturesque hills in the neighborhood rose many a Roman villa, to trace the boundaries of which and to bring to light the treasures of art concealed in them, are tasks which have of late years amply rewarded the researches of Mr. Scarth and other learned antiquaries. No wonder that on this favored spot we should meet with so many memorials of former greatness, when we reflect on the length of time during which the imperial troops and rich colonsits of a highly civilized people sojourned here; having held undisturbed possession of the country for as many years as have elapsed from the first discovery of America to our own times.

One of our former Presidents, Dr. Daubeny, has remarked that nearly all the most celebrated hot-springs of Europe, such as those of Aix-la-Chapelle, Baden-Baden, Naples, Auvergne, and the Pyrenees, have not declined in temperature since the days of the Ro