that produce it. I believe the best palm oil comes from Lagos and Opobo, the worst from the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone.

Other valuable African oils are produced from castor-oil seeds, which are worth £10 a ton; ground nuts, which are worth from £15 to £17 a ton; and the celebrated Shia" butter," a thick oily substance obtained from the seeds of a tall handsome tree, first brought to our knowledge by the celebrated traveller Mungo Park, and after whom it has been named Butyrospermum Parkii.

Among other valuable vegetable products I might mention, at the risk of wearying you, the seeds of Moringa pterygosperma and of Bixa orellana (which are worth £23 a ton); red peppers, which are worth from £15 to £20 a ton; seeds of the Lophira alata, worth £7 a ton, and of the Phytelephas macrocarpa, or vegetable ivory, which are worth £10 a ton. Then there are the leaves and twigs of the Artemisia judaica, worth £20 a ton; the bark and roots of the Turmeric, a valuable dye, which are worth £10 a ton; the bark of the Pterocarpus erinaceus or kino," which is very useful for tanning, and is worth £25 a ton; the bark also of the Cassia fistula, worth £11 a ton; Baobab fibre, from the great gouty Adansonia tree, and the flour of the Cassava or Manioc, both of which are worth £8 a ton; and lastly, various valuable dyewoods and timber, such as camwood" (Baphia nitida) and ebony (from the Diospyros tree); the African teak, and the durable mangrove wood, which resists the attacks of white ants.

Nor is Africa bare in minerals from the little we know of her rocks. Gold appears to run right up the continent from South Africa across the Zambezi, through Nyasaland, past Tanganyika and the Albert Nyanza, right up to Darfur in the Soudan; and from Darfur another gold belt would appear to run diagonally westward across the Niger basin, and at the back of our West African colonies. Silver has as yet only been found and worked near the river Benue, in West Central Africa, where it is met with in conjunction with antimony. Antimony reappears in other parts of Africa, so it is possible that silver may also be found elsewhere. Africa is singularly rich in copper and iron. As far as we yet know the chief sources of copper

supply are in South and South-West Africa, in South. Central Africa between the basins of the Congo and the Zambezi, in Nyasaland, in the country west of Tanganyika, and in many other parts of the Congo basin, at the back of the Cameroons, in the Niger basin, and in Darfur. Iron is simply everywhere, and the indigenous savages seemed to have passed directly from the age of wooden implements into the full use of iron. Coal is known to exist on the west coast of Lake Nyasa, at many places in the valley of the Zambezi River, in Natal, and in the Transvaal, and in some parts of the Tanganyika coast. Sir John Kirk has told me that when engaged with Livingstone in exploring the Zambezi countries, he has frequently burnt on bis steamers the coal which he obtained from the deposits near Tete, and has found it excellent steam-making fuel. The use of Natal coal is rapidly spreading in South Africa. The diamond mines of South Africa are so well known that I need not allude to them further. Diamonds have not as yet been discovered in other parts of Africa; but the existence of other precious stones, such as topazes and opals, is reported from various districts. When we think how very little the soil of the greater part of Africa has been examined by experts, and how the small portion already searched has produced such valuable results, we may be led to hope there are greater treasures still in store to reward a more thorough investigation.

In the natives of Africa I believe we possess sturdy workers and efficient allies in the opening up of this neglected continent, provided they are treated and utilized in a proper manner. Our method of dealing with them is rather too intricate a question to be disposed of in a few hasty words, and is quite sufficiently important to be dealt with in a separate address, if I had the time to deliver it and you had the patience to listen to it. I will, however, venture to conclude this paper with a few remarks about the native Africans and our relations with them, which may help to elucidate this important problem.

The population of Africa is distributed in a most irregular manner; that is to say, there are some districts which are densely peopled, and again there are even territories almost without a human being. Fortunately for our ideas of colonization some of the most sparsely populated portions of

Africa have for Europeans-the most healthy climate. I am referring, for instance, to large portions of the Sahara Desert, which with artesian wells and irrigation will become as inhabitable and healthy as Egypt; to the nearly equally arid steppes of Betshuanaland, and much of Africa south of the Zambezi ; to those grand well-watered plateaux between Nyasa and Tanganyika, where the depopulation seems to have arisen rather from incessant civil war and slave-raiding than any other cause; and to the snow-crested highlands of eastern equatorial Africa. In certain districts, such as the banks of the Lower Niger, the British West African Colonies, Egypt, Natal, the shores of the Victoria Nyanza, and parts of the Congo basin, the native population is nearly as dense as it is in India; but with these exceptions I should say that the average population of those parts of Africa at present uninhabited by Europeans, is in a much lesser ratio to the square mile than in Tropical Asia. Still, in all those portions of Africa where there is a fairly abundant native population, the climatic conditions render it unlikely that Europeans will choose them for a very long time to come, as territories to be actually colonized by white men; but what we want to do in districts like these is to maintain peace, encourage trade, and generally raise the natives to a condition

of civilization.

The native Africans with whom we have to deal in our various colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence in that continent, may be divided into three sections: -the Arabs or people of Semitic race, who are the descendants of the Arab invaders of Africa who settled in the eastern, northern, and north-central portions of that continent at various times, from the beginning of the Christian era to the present day; the Negroid races, such as the Gallas, the Somalis, the Nubians, and the Fulas or Fulbe, who may be said to form a kind of half-way type between the Semite and the blackman; and, lastly, the great Negro race itself, which inhabits all Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and which although it offers the apparently diverse forms of the stunted yellow Bushman, the black-faced obese Hottentot, the tall statuesque Zulu, the handsome chocolateskinned peoples of the Cameroons or the Congo, the hook-nosed haughty-looking Hausa or Mandingo, or the wide-nostrilled

blubber-lipped native of the Oil Rivers, the tiny dwarfs of the Congo forests, or the giant Bari or Masai of the Nile valley and Eastern Africa, is still, with its peculiar curly hair and other special characteristics, one of the most clearly marked divisions of the human race.

With the Arabs we have or shall have to deal in the Nile valley, in Bornu, Wadai, Darfur, at Zanzibar, and on the Zanzibar coast, on the Lakes Victoria Nyanza, Tanganyika, and Nyasa. We come in contact with the Negroids in our Niger dominions, in the Nile valley, in Somaliland, and in the Galla country. The Negroes, on the other hand, meet us every where, in all our African possessions, either as the serfs, slaves or soldiery of the Arabs or the Negroids, or as themselves the sole indigenous occupants of the soil.

Of all the problems we have to face in our intermeddling with the affairs of Africa, that of our relations with the Arabs seems in many ways the most important. They have at present ousted us from the Egyptian Soudan, and but a little while ago they threatened to expel the British from the shores of Lake Nyasa. On the other hand, they have long been the upholders of British influence at Zanzibar, and have materially assisted by their goodwill the firm establishment of the British East African Company in Eastern Equatorial Africa. How are we to view the Arabs? Are we to look upon them as enemies everywhere to be extirpated, and to be as ruthlessly expelled from Africa as were the Moors from Spain? Or are we to regard them in the light of possible friends and allies, and as a people not lacking in good qualities who may yet play a useful part in the development of Africa? I think the latter is the more sensible conclusion to arrive at, and one more consistent with a practical acceptation of things as they are. It must not be concluded that I find no fault with the conduct of these Arabs in Central Africa; on the contrary, I disapprove of much that they do. I would rather they had never gone there at all, because we should find the unsophisticated natives easier to trade with and to govern, if we were without the keen commercial rivalry of the Arabs, and the sturdy, independent, warlike spirit which they are apt to infuse into their native allies. But what we have to remember is, that the Arabs are in Central Africa, both

as wandering merchants and as settlers, rulers, and colonists, and we have got to deal with them as they are, and not as we would wish them to be. From what I know of them, I believe that by a little tact and patience-they having good qualities in them-we may skilfully make use of them, and turn their dispositions to good account. I think the Arab as colonist and soldier may turn out a very useful ally. As to his Mohammedan propaganda, it hardly exists. Livingstone found that out long ago. The white and the black Arabs are generally very strict in their own religious duties, but make little attempt to spread Mohammedan tenets among their Negro followers. The utmost they do is to teach them a few pious exclamations, and to kill animals for food by cutting their throats, to perform certain ablutions, to adopt circumcision, and to abjure the use of the numerous alcoholic beverages which the Negro knows so well how to manufacture from the grain, and roots, and palm sap of his native country. If you wish to suppress the slave trade, give them something better to do; that is to say, find other employment for themopen out prospects of other and legitimate commerce, and they will be by no means loth to give up purchasing the people whom the Negro chiefs are so anxious to sell. Moreover the real way to combat the slave trade-to extirpate its cause-is not to quarrel with the Arabs if you can help it, but to get the Arabs to join you, which they are not unwilling to do, in subduing and taming irrational, bloodthirsty wild beasts like the Angoni Zulus, the Wa-wemba, the Wa-rugaruga, the Masai, and all the hundred-and-one races of Negro robbers who, as soon as they obtain a little prosperity and power, rise up, harry, and destroy their fellow negroes. The scheme proposed by some enthusiasts of starting crusades and expelling the Arabs from Central Africa is about as easy of accomplishment as that of driving the Turks from Europe and Palestine. It might be done, but it would be quite as costly in money and lives, and perhaps as futile to British interests, as the last-named project.

With regard to the Negroids of Africa, such as the Fulbe of the Niger, the Nubians, the Somalis, and the Gallas, we shall find them a gradually disappearing factor in the evolution of the Dark Conti

nent. They will no doubt be absorbed into the Arab ranks on the one hand, or identified with their numerically superior Negro neighbors and followers on the other. As far as our present relations

with them are concerned, we find them easier to deal with than the Arabs for the reason of their lesser bravery and determination, but in other ways more disagreeable subjects to tackle, because of their greater barbarism and more ruthless savagery where their own dealings with the Negroes are concerned; still they do not seem to have much future before them and, as I said before, will eventually be absorbed either by the Arabs, from whom they accept their religion and such civilization as they possess, or by the Negroes, with whom they constantly and freely intermarry. And so we are left with this last problem to consider-our relations with the Negro race.

By their own unaided efforts I doubt whether the Negroes would ever advance much above the status of savagery in which they still exist in those parts of Africa where neither European nor Arab civilization has as yet reached them. There they are still to be found leading a life which, in its essential features of culture and social organization, is scarcely altered from what it was four thousand years ago, when the black men and their simple arts and savage surroundings were truthfully limned in Egyptian frescoes. The Negro seems to require the intervention of some superior race before he can be roused to any definite advance from the low stage of human development in which he has contentedly remained for many thousand years. But, when once he does come in contact with civilization, he accepts it with extraordinary readiness, and surpasses all other low-grade varieties of man in the facility with which in one generation, in the one individual, he can skip two or three thousand years, and transform himself from a naked, brutish savage into an excellent short-hand clerk, a telegraph operator, a skilled photographer, a steamer-engineer, a first-class cook, or an irreproachable butler. The black race has, of course, like the other sections of humanity, many faults and shortcomings. It is, as a rule, strongly averse to continuous, regularized hard work, and its average disposition is passionate, noisy, vain, and quarrelsome. But with all his defects the Negro is more

likable, more akin to us of the white race in disposition, and far less alien to our civilization than is the cold, inscrutable, reptilian Chinese. In the course of two or three centuries I believe the Negroes of British Africa will only differ from their white fellow-subjects in the color of their skins. But for some time to come the forefathers of these completely civilized men of color will require to submit themselves to our guidance and control. They must be persuaded and, if necessary, compelled to abandon their incessant intertribal wars, which keep half of Africa in a fluctuating state of devastation; they must be weaned from slave-making and slave-dealing, from cannibalism, from bush-fires which destroy so much valuable forest, from head-hunting, witch-burning, and human sacrifices. And in teaching them these lessons, let us endeavor to approach them in a kindly, friendly way, urging them to reforms rather by appeals to their innate good sense, to their selfinterest, and to their naïve desire to be "all same white man," than by bullying threats of bombardments, burnings, and hangings. Above all, let us avoid irritating the more astute of the black or yellow natives by the assumption in our preachings to them of a lofty tone of impeccability where our own past actions are concerned. We should do well to remember that the worst of Dahomey's slaughterings of human victims is scarcely equal to one 'day's guillotining during the height of the French Revolution, from which the latest Dahomean hecatomb is less than one hundred years removed; that if the other day a witch was burned to death on the shores of Lake Nyasa within sight of a Universities' Mission station, the same practice was religiously carried out by our forefathers in England and America two centuries ago; and that few modern African

monarchs contrive to hang, draw, quarter, flay, behead, and burn so many of their subjects as did our eighth Henry, our bloody" Mary, and our good Queen Bess, while no African priesthood yet discovered has been known to be guilty of one tithe of the damnable iniquities perpetrated by the hellish Holy Inquisition of Spain, Portugal, and Naples. We are really not so many centuries ahead of the Negroes that we can afford to be arrogant.. Still we can give them the benefit of our own inherited improvements, experiences, and experiments in religion, morality, political economy, party government, and brotherly love, and in introducing some security for life, liberty, and property as the first of our elementary reforms, we shall place before the much-harassed inhabitants of Africa the same clear hope of permanent. civilization which our rule has caused to. grow up in India.

For those of us who believe in the duty of helping our poor relations, who feel that it is incumbent on the rich and intelligent, the civilized and comfortably-offi among the peoples of the world, to extend a helping hand to raise their backward or retrograde fellow-humans from a lower,. wretcheder kind of life to a level approach-ing nearer to the present high-tide of humanity, it will be seen at once that a great work lies before the British nation in Africa; and to those who devote more interest to political considerations it must appear evident that this task of moulding an African empire should assist in keeping up. our energy as a great Imperial Power,. should stimulate all our arts and manufac-. tures, and should bring us the same increase of wisdom, knowledge, power and wealth which have accrued to us from our splendid dominions in Asia.-Fortnightly, Review.

Ar this moment the press and the public all over the civilized world are shocked and moved to painful sympathy with the destruction by fire of Salonica and its beautiful mosque, and of a portion of the glorious pile of the Alhambra. No words

NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIII,, No. 1.

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seem to be affecting or eloquent enough to lament the loss to history, to art, and to humanity, caused by such conflagrations as those which have now swept away the churches, archives, and bouses of Salonica, and the court and hall of Granada, and in

other times destroyed the irreparable treasures of Alexandria, of Moscow, and of Constantinople.

All the Muses weep in unison with Charity, and the loss of Clio is perhaps the greatest loss of all, when monuments and documents never to be equalled in interest and value become the prey of flames, either through accident or war. Yet there is a kind of destruction still more cruel, still more heart-rending to witness, because more wanton, and so more criminal, than that caused by the bursting shell of the invader, or the devouring fires of such accidents as those of which, a little time ago, Salonica is now, and Antwerp was, the victim. It is such destruction as may be seen by any passer-by in the cities of Italy; a ruin which has not the excuse of war, nor yet the plea of necessity, but is wrought by the devil of cupidity, who uses for his tool the Caliban of ignorance. It is but a brief while since, that the obliteration of Rome was described by a graphic and scholarly writer; less attention has been given to the actual and impending obliteration of Florence. I use the word obliteration because it is the one which best describes the senseless, merciless, and leprosy-like process which eats away all the which eats away all the features of a city, all its color, all its outline, all its expression, to leave it a mere mass of monotonous squalor and vulgarity, as the leper's face is a mass of featureless and festering sores. The manner in which Rome has been dealt with since the entry of the monarchical troops is a shame to the century which witnesses it; it is an outrage to the culture of the whole civilized world. No siege or hostile occupation could have wrought one-half the havoc; and an earthquake which should have levelled with the dust the walls of the Colisseum, would have been reverence and tenderness beside the accursed and blasphemous impudence which has vamped up, and scraped, and battened, and smartened, and daubed over its gigantic relics into a paying show-place, fit only to receive the gaping cheap-tripper of London and New York.

The scandalous destruction of Rome, through the envy of modern municipalities and the greed of native and foreign speculators, is excused by its destroyers under the plea of making it thus a modern capital. This plea is paltry, flimsy, and untrue; but cren its feeble and false ex

cuse cannot be made for the similar ruin which is being done in Florence. When the capital, with its Hun-like hordes of jerry-builders, hungry engineers, and penniless officials, betook itself to Rome, there went with those every shadow of excuse to continue the barbarous demolitions and erections which had marked the brief residence in it of Sovereign and Parliament. Much irreparable havoc had been wrought in that short period; but when once the Court and Chambers had been transferred from the Arno to the Tiber's side, with them went all kind of pretence for the continuance of such works. There were then two courses open to the Florentine diles to pursue one to leave the city exactly as it was, and reduce the fiscal burdens of it; or, keeping up the heavy imposts, to plant, adorn, and beautify its outskirts, leaving its historic heart untouched. With an almost inconceivable idiotcy, the Municipality did neither one nor the other; it has kept up, even increased, the enormous taxation, accepted increased burdens for Imperial imposts, and has obliterated the ancient beauty of the town, while surrendering the outskirts to every scheming builder and speculator who cared to reproduce in them the wretched lath-and-plaster houses which disgrace English suburbs.

One of the greatest charms of Florence, both for health and beauty, were only a few years ago the garden-like fields which began at its city gates, the vineyards, the orchards, the wild-rose hedges, the grassy lands, which were at a stone's throw from its streets and squares. Now there is no direction in which these have not been cut up and turned into dusty, dreary, squalid, rubbish-laden building-ground. There is no direction in which anything of the true green country can be reached, without first wading through acres of hideous little cotton box erections, and all the cindermounds, lime-heaps, hoardings, and waste grounds which accompany the jerry-builder wherever his accursed shadow falls.

Let it not be supposed for a moment that these new buildings signify any increase in prosperity which might console for their frightfulness those who are intent on material gain. Ask any banker or tradesman you will, unless he speculate in tramways, and you will hear from him that in wealth and fashionable repute Florence has sunk as rapidly as these flimsy