The Decided Superiority Of The Interior Of Africa To The Coast, Renders This Event Highly Important.

Steam, so peculiarly adapted to river navigation, affords an instrument by which the various obstacles may be overcome, and vessels may be enabled to penetrate into the very heart of the African continent.

On the return of the Landers, the question was mooted by the Geographical Society of London, whether the Quorra or Niger, as discovered by Lander, was the same river as the Kigir of the ancients. Upon the whole subject it would have been sufficient to refer to D'Anville and Rennell, who favour the affirmative of the question, and on the opposite side to M. Wakkenaer, who of all later writers has examined it with the greatest diligence, had not recent discoveries furnished us with better grounds for forming a conclusive opinion, than even the latest of these authors possessed.

Maritime surveys have now completed a correct outline of Northern Africa. Major Laing, by ascertaining the source of the Quorra to be not more than sixteen hundred feet above the sea, proved that it could not flow to the Nile. Denham and Clapperton demonstrated that it did not discharge itself into the Lake of Bornou, and at length its real termination in a delta, at the head of the great gulf of the western coast of Africa, has rewarded the enlightened perseverance of the British government, and the courage and enterprise of its servants. The value to science of this discovery, and the great merit of those, whose successive exertions have prepared and completed it, is the more striking, when we consider that the hydrography of an unknown country is the most important step to a correct knowledge of its geography, and that in barbarous Africa, nothing short of the ocular inquiries of educated men, is sufficient to procure the requisite facts, and yet it is not a little extraordinary, that the termination of the Quorra or Niger has been discovered by two men, who, in point of scientific knowledge, education, or literary acquirements, stand the lowest in the scale of the African travellers.

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