SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY.


THE COURSE OF THE NIGER.


The discovery of the termination of the course of the Niger, will be of
the greatest importance to geography, to our political power, and to
civilization.

With regard to geography, perhaps the contradiction which was afforded
by the various sources whence we derived our knowledge of the character
of the interior of Africa, and of the course of, next to the Nile, the
most renowned, and, as was considered from the same accounts, the
greatest river of that country, have in late times given unlimited zest
in the pursuit of further information, and has not in the least
detracted from the pleasure with which we find that we are indebted to
our countrymen for the solution of this all-absorbing problem. It
appears, that among the ancients many facts connected with the geography
of the interior of Africa were well known, which have still been an
object of discussion among the moderns; and of these, we may enumerate
the occurrence of a large lake or marsh (for it is either, at different
seasons of the year), whose real existence, beyond the speculations of
geographers, was very unsatisfactorily established, until the journey of
Denham and Clapperton; and the fact of the occurrence of a great river
in the west, emptying itself into the ocean, though many were of opinion
that it lost itself in an inland marsh, or in the desert, while others
supported the opinion of its identity with the Nile of the Egyptians.
The researches of Ptolemy and the Arabian geographers on the Nile of the