WHO DISCOVERED THE SOURCES OF THE NILE? WHO DISCOVERED THE SOURCES OF THE NILE? A LETTER TO SIR RODERICK I. MURCHISON, K.C.B., ETC., PEESIDENT OF THE EOYAL GEOGEAPHICAL SOCIETY; WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING A LETTER TO THE EIGHT HON. THE LOED ASHBUETON, WHEN PEESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY. BY CHARLES T.gEKE, PH.D., F.S.A., F.R.G.S., ETC., AUTHOR OF ' OBJGINES BIBLIC-S!,' ' THE SOURCES OF THE NILE,' ETC. WILLIAMS AND NOEGATE: U.HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON; AMI 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. 1863. TOVTOV fief ovv TOV [BajO/3apticov] KO\TTOV irepioiKovaiv Aldloires avdpu- irofyayoi, ttiv O.ITQ fivfffjitov Su'iKei TO rjjs Se\j/v7;$ opos, acf ov VTro^e^oyrai ras ^IOVCLS at rov Net'Xov Xt'/zi/at. AHOTJND THIS [BAEBARIAN] GTTLF DWELL THE MAN-EATING ETHIOPIANS, FKOM THE WEST OF WHOM EXTEND THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON, FROM WHICH THE LAKES OF THE NILE RECEIVE THE SNOWS. Claudii Ptolemcei Geograpliice lib. iv. cap. ix. 3. TO SIR RODERICK I. MURCHISON, K.C.B., ETC. PBESIDENT OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY. SIR, IT has become requisite that I should thus publicly address you with reference to the subject which now mainly occupies the attention of Geographers, and which necessarily was the principal theme of your recent Anniversary Address from the Chair of the Royal Geographical Society. On the 9th of last month, when it had been announced by you that Captain Speke had "settled the Nile," though no particulars were given, I took the liberty of addressing you a letter, in which I stated that the question solved was in fact this : Is Lake Nyanza within the Basin of the Nile ? and I sent you a copy of a map taken from my work 'The Sources of the Nile/ published in 1860, on which, for your information, I had marked the two possible solutions of the question. The one was, that if there were a range of moun- tains crossing the African continent from east to west near the equator, then Nyanza could not communicate with the Nile. The other was, that if the mountains running from north to south and forming the eastern side of the Basin extended beyond the parallel of latitude in which the southern extremity of the lake lies, then Nyanza would necessarily be included within that Basin, and the streams flowing from those moun- tains into the lake would be head-streams of the Nile. And I pointed out to you that I had advocated the latter opinion as long ago as the year 1848, when, at the Swansea Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, I read a paper " On the Sources of the Nile in the Mountains of the Moon ;" referring you to the abstract of that paper published in the ' Report' of the Association for 1848, "Transactions of the Sections," pages 63, 64. At the same time I recalled to your remembrance the plan of an exploratory journey proposed by me, likewise in 1848 (and partly carried out), for the discovery of the Sources of the Nile, by penetrating from the east coast of Africa, near Zanzibar, as Captains Speke and Grant have now succeeded in doing. On the llth of May, two days after I had so written to you, I attended a Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, at which you presided, when I publicly expressed myself to the effect stated in my letter to you and here repeated. After fuller information had been received from Captain Speke, verifying the hypothesis I had so long maintained, I addressed you again on the 19th of May, referring you further to my paper of the year 1846, " On the Nile and its Tributaries," printed in the 17th volume of the Society's Journal (pages 1-84), in which was first given the key to the arcanum magnum of geography ; and I stated that, as I had pointed out the position of the Sources of the Nile, had shown the way to reach them, and had actually set on foot an expedition for their discovery and exploration in the position indicated, I was the theoretical discoverer; and I requested you to recognize me as such in your Anniversary Address. In doing so I naturally relied on your impartiality, both in your individual character and in that of President of the Royal Geographical Society, to give me the credit that is my due. And, in order that you might be better able to form an unbiased judgement, I referred you to the letter addressed by me, on the 23rd of April 1862, to your predecessor in office, Lord Ashburton, in which I had recapitulated the opinions expressed on the subject in the Anniversary Addresses of the Presidents of the Society from 1848 to 1852 inclusive*. To my astonishment, I was given to understand in reply, that either I must be content to have no allusion whatever made to me in the President's Address, or else, if mentioned at all, I should have attributed to me opinions which I was alleged to have entertained and made public as long ago as the year 1846. And this, it appeared, was to be done without taking into account what I had subsequently published on the subject as facts from time to time became known; which facts, though necessarily occasioning changes and modifications in the details, have esta- blished the general truth of my original hypothesis. Apart from the inconsiderateness of overlooking (especially after the receipt of my letters of the 9th and 19th of May) all that I am so well known to have done since 1846, I was sorry to find the opinions which I expressed in my paper of that date far from correctly stated in your reply. I would not do you the injustice to imagine that you yourself had referred to that paper ; for, had you done so, you would have been incapable of so misrepresenting me generally, and even misquoting me in one particular instance. My words are (in page 76), " The source of the Nile is situate at a comparatively short distance from the sea-coast within the dominions of the Imam of Maskat." By the introduction of the word " and " between the words " sea- coast " and " within," I am made to have expressed the opinion that the source of the Nile is within those dominions ; and you then proceed to show the incorrectness of this opinion, which I never entertained. The intimation of your intended line of conduct with respect to me having only reached me on the morning of Saturday, May the 23rd, I had barely time, before the Anniversary Meeting on the following Monday, to bring to your notice some additional * My letter to Lord Ashburton is given as an Appendix to this letter. 6 facts to substantiate my right of discovery. The result was, that on May the 25th you recalled the determination which you had communicated to me three days previously, and in your Anni- versary Address made mention of me on more than one occasion. From the report of your Address in 'The Times,' it would appear, however, that what you did say was said as if meant to " damn with faint praise." In this I express not merely my own opinion,but also that of several persons competent to form a judge- ment on the subject. Indeed your assertion that Captain Speke has proved that the Mountains of the Moon, " which Ptolemy spoke of as traversing the equatorial regions of Africa from east to west, have no such range as theoretically inferred by Dr. Beke" may be (and by many is) understood as meaning that my theoretical inference has been proved by Captain Speke to be erroneous ; whereas the fact is that he has entirely confirmed it. I should be sorry to believe you could have had any intention to misrepresent me, or indeed not to do me full justice. I am therefore led to conclude that you have (doubtless unavoidably) relied for information and assistance on others, who, if not mis- leading you designedly, have done so through great want of knowledge of the subject. Were it not so, you surely would not have spoken of the " Montes Lunae of Burton and Speke ;" for, as is manifest from what is stated by the former traveller in the second volume of his work ' The Lake Regions of Central Africa,' no two persons could possibly differ more widely than they do with respect to the "Mountains of the Moon;" Speke calling by that name a range of mountains 6000 or 8000 feet high, in the form of a horseshoe or crescent, encircling the northern end of Lake Tanganyika; whilst Burton (in pages 90, 91) denies the exist- ence of any such range, which he stigmatizes as " \vholly hypo- thetical or rather inventive," and contends (in pages 178-180) that "from the fifth parallel of south latitude to the equator an elevated mass of granite and sandstone formation crosses from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the centre of Tropical Africa," and probably extends even to the west side of the continent, there to " inosculate with the ridge, which .... is popularly known, according to Denham and Clapperton, as- el-Gibel Gumhr, Jebel Kamar, or Mons Lunae." Within " a huge gap " " breaking the continuity of the line " of this vast equatorial range, Captain Burton places Lake Nyanza, which he thus excludes from the hydrographical system of the Nile. The existence of an extensive mountain-range, running from east to west and separating Nyanza from the Upper Nile, has, down to the latest moment, found many favourers among African geographers ; and (as will, of course, be within your remem- brance) it was publicly advocated by Mr. Galton, so recently as May the llth, at the Society's Meeting. It is in fact this vast mountain-system of Captain Burton and others that I take to be " the hypothetical chain of mountains . . . traversing the equatorial regions of Africa from east to west/' of which Captain Speke is declared by you to have now established the non-existence from his own personal observation ; and not the Snowy " Mountains of the Moon" of Ptolemy, which are de- scribed by that geographer as lying to the west of the country of the cannibal negroes, who dwell along the shores of the Bar- barian Gulf, near the Island of Menuthias (Zanzibar)*, the melted snows from them being received into the lakes of the Nile, and * To this day the tribes inhabiting the east coast of Africa near Zanzibar are eaters of human flesh the Nyam-Nyam of the Arabian geographers. In the ' Bulletin de la Societe de Geographic' (3rd ser. vol. viii. p. 313), M. Eu- gene de Froberville speaks of the Amakoua (Makua) as cannibals of the most ferocious and sanguinary character; and Captain Burton, in his work already referred to (vol. i. p. 123), describes the Wadoe as addicted to " a practice which has made their name terrible even in African ears." He fixes the " proper habitat " of the Wadoe in about 6 S. lat., that is to say, between Menuthias and the snow-capped Mountains of the Moon precisely where, seventeen centuries ago, Ptolemy placed his " man-eating Ethiopians." which I had identified with the mountains forming the eastern side of the Basin of the Nile, before any of the Snowy Moun- tains, Kilimanjaro, Kenia, Doengo-Engai, &c., or either of the Lakes Tanganyika and Nyanza, were discovered. Under all the circumstances of the case, therefore, I feel it to be due to myself to assert publicly my formal claim to be recognized as the theoretical discoverer of the Sources of the Nile, and at the same time to place on record my sense of the unsuitable treatment I have experienced during the last three years from the Royal Geographical Society, or rather from those by whom the Society's affairs are managed. When I returned to England in 1860, after an absence of several years, I did hope that within the Council of the Society the old leaven of 1848 would have been exhausted. But to my great disappointment I found that when, in 1861, 1 communicated to the Society my paper " On the Mountains forming the Eastern Side of the Basin of the Nile," it was refused insertion in the Society's Journal, or even in abstract in the Proceedings. I was still more grieved in 1862 at the difficulties I experienced in obtaining a hearing for the narrative of my journey to Harran in Padan Aram, and thence over Mount Gilead into the Promised Land in the footsteps of the Patriarch Jacob ; which occasioned my letter to Lord Ashburton already mentioned. But the climax has been attained now in 1863, when I have been informed by the President that, in his Anniversary Address, of which the most interesting topic is the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile in accordance with my hypothesis and my plan of exploration of 1848, it was deliberately contemplated either to attribute to me opinions which I do not entertain or else to ignore me altogether. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your most obedient humble Servant, CHARLES BEKE. Beke*bourne House, near Canterbury, June 5th, 1863. APPENDIX. Letter from Dr. Beke to Lord Ashburton, dated April 23rd, 1862 ; with notes now added. MY LORD, I am sony that my sending you (as I had intended) my paper for the Royal Geographical Society before the meeting of the Council on the 28th instant has been prevented by the necessity of replying to the article in last Saturday's l Athe- naeum/ from the pen of one of the members of the Council, which, if allowed to remain unanswered, would doubtless cause the rejection of my paper*. Sir Henry Rawlinson's public attack on me will be publicly * The article in question appeared in the ' Athenaeum ' of April the 1 9th (No. 1799, pp. 529-531 ). It begins thus : " Dr. Beke has been long known for the hardihood not to say extravagance of his proposed reforms in Biblical geography. There is hardly a country, or a city, mentioned in Scrip- ture which he is content to leave in the position ordinarily assigned to it. His latest crotchet for I can really call it by no other name has been to apply the title of ' Aram Naharaim ' to the plain watered by the two rivers of Damascus, and to identify the Haran of Genesis with a petty village in that district;" * * * which " village" the writer of the article, in the course of his argument, " in- sists on," is " a place utterly unknown either in ancient or modern geography." My answer, though written before my letter to Lord Ashburton, did not appear in the ' Athenaeum ' till May the 24th (No. 1804, pp. 693, 694). In it I reminded Sir Henry Rawlinson that what he styled my " latest crotchet " was one of the principal subjects treated of in ' Origines Biblicae,' a work which he had known and studied from about the time of its publication in 1834. On October the 25th following ('Athenaeum,' No. 1826, p. 530), I added a reference to the ' Moshtarik ' of the Arabian geographer Yakut, who flourished in the 12th century of our era, in which Harran is mentioned as " one of the towns of the Ghuthah of Damascus." The three Ionic columns still standing there, with the numerous other architectural remains, prove it to have been in the intervening ages a Greek or Roman city, the name of which is lost for the present, but might easily be recovered. 10 repelled. I have no misgivings as to the result. It is not on that account, therefore, that I now trouble your Lordship. It is in order that hostile personal influences may not, as they have done before, operate detrimentally to me in the Council of the Society of which your Lordship is the President, that I feel it to be my imperative duty, not less to your Lordship than to myself, to lay before you a few facts which (I am convinced your Lordship will agree with me) you ought to know. The subject of Baron Vander Decken's visit to the Snowy Moun- tain Kilimanjaro cannot fail to form a prominent feature in your Lordship's Anniversary Address ; and in this respect like- wise I venture to hope that what I am about to relate will prove not merely interesting but useful to your Lordship. In the year 1846, some time after my return from Abyssinia (for my extensive explorations in which country I received the Gold Medals of the Geographical Societies of London and France), I wrote a paper " On the Nile and its Tributaries," which was read before the former Society, and printed in the 1 7th volume of its Journal. In the Anniversary Address of the President, Lord Colchester, this paper was designated a " very important" one ; and in the opinion thus expressed geographers both in England and in foreign countries have unanimously concurred. In it I first enunciated my interpretation of Claudius Pto- lemy's famous text respecting the Sources of the Nile in two lakes receiving the snows from the Mountains of the Moon ; and having, from the consideration of that and other authorities, arrived at the conclusion that " the source of the Nile is situate at a comparatively short distance from the sea-coast within the dominions of the Imam of Maskat, the friend and ally of the principal maritime powers of the world," I observed that " there cannot exist any obstacle of moment in the way of setting at rest this great geographical problem, which for thirty centuries has riveted the attention of the civilized world, at the same time that it has baffled the attempts to solve it made by the most celebrated rulers of Egypt, from the Pharaohs down to Mo- hammed Ali." * * Journ. R. G. S. vol. xvii. p. /6. Captain Speke, on his return from his first journey, expressed himself in somewhat similar terms, saying, in '.Black- 1] Confining myself only to what has been recorded in the Society's Journals, I have next to mention a paper which Mr. Frederick Ayrton read before the Society in the beginning of 1848, and published in vol. xviii. of the Journal (pp. 48-74). Mr. Ayrton, a member of the Council, was a warm partisan of M. d'Abbadie, who pretended to have discovered the source of the Nile in Kaffa, several degrees to the north of the Equator j and his paper was a strong eulogy of his friend at the expense of myself. Of Mr. Ayrton's paper the President, Mr. W. J. Hamilton, spoke in high terms of praise in his Anniversary Address; and after reviewing our respective arguments (un- favourably for me, and favourably for Mr. Ayrton), he concludes by stating that the latter " shows that, as in a tropical climate no great river could take its origin except amidst a lofty mountain- range, we have no authority for looking for the sources of the Nile in a district where it is shown no elevated mountains can exist." * Mr. Hamilton's Address was delivered on the 22nd of May, 1848. Eleven days previously, namely, on the llth of May, the Rev. J. Rebmann, one of the Church Missionaries stationed near Mombas, had discovered the Snowy Mountain Kilimanjaro precisely where Mr. Hamilton said it was shown no elevated mountain could exist ! Long before the news of this discovery could reach Europe in fact shortly after the date of Mr. Hamilton's Address so satisfied was I of the correctness of my hypothesis, that, Dr. Bialloblotzky having volunteered to perform an exploratory journey into Eastern Africa with a view to the discovery of the sources of the Nile, I undertook the collection of a subscription in aid of his expedition, which however turned out a failure, wood's Magazine' for October 1859, p. 397, that his discovery of Nyanza had " disclosed the probable and, he believed, true source of that mighty stream the Nile, and had almost, if not entirely, solved a problem which it had been the first geographical desideratum of many thousand years to ascertain, and the ambition of the first monarchs of the world to unravel." * Journ. R. G. S. vol. xviii. p. xxxvii. In p. Ivii, Mr. Hamilton asserts that M. d'Abbadie had " succeeded in ascertaining the source of the main stream of the Egyptian Nile the White Nile, or western branch which was sup- posed, according to a paper by Dr. Beke, lately published in our Journal, to exist two or three degrees to the S. of the equator." 12 the traveller not having been able to proceed further than Zan- zibar. I beg leave to lay before your Lordship copies of the several circulars which I addressed from time to time to the subscribers to the expedition ; from which you will perceive that it was substantially the same as that which, ten years later was undertaken by Captains Burton and Speke, under the patronage of the Royal Geographical Society, and at the expense of that Society and the British nation. Mr. Rebmann's discovery of Kilimanjaro was, in the next Anniversary Address (1849) of the President of the Society, suitably described as " most unexpected." Mr. Hamilton con- tinued: "The discovery of this lofty mountain has been assumed as giving additional strength to the arguments of those who look for the sources of the White Nile to the south of the Equator ; but its comparative proximity to the coast, and the course of the rivers both to the north and south which would carry off a great portion of the waters resulting from its melted snows, ought to make us cautious in adopting such a conclusion without more detailed information."* I do not for a moment imagine that the President was not perfectly sincere and even desirous of being impartial in the controversy between Mr. Ayrton and myself. But the latter gentleman, who was known as Mr. Hamilton's intimate friend, was an active and energetic member of the Council ; and it was not unnatural that his opinions and feelings should have had greater weight with the President than those of myself, who had no special representative in the Council, and stood in no rela- tion, friendly or otherwise, to Mr. Hamilton. The following year the President, Captain (now Rear- Admiral) Smyth, when alluding to Mr. Rebmann's estimate of the height of Kilimanjaro 20,000 feet remarks, "This circumstance really gives a shade of probability to the hypothesis which suggests a mountain-chain of 300 miles from, and parallel to, the eastern coast, and from wliich the upper affluents of the Nile would issue. But even if this assumption were proved as a fact, it would not at all prevent the existence of other distant affluents in the south-west and south." t I need scarcely remark that it is my. * Journ. R. G. S. vol. xix. p. Ixxvi. f Ibid. vol. xx. p. Ix. 13 hypothesis to which " a shade of probability " is thus cautiously but impartially accorded. Before the next Anniversary Address the controversy between M. d'Abbadie (with his champion in the Council, Mr. Ayrton) and myself had come to an issue. Having elaborately and mi- nutely examined that traveller's alleged journey to Kaffa for the purpose of discovering the source of the Nile, and having come to the decided conclusion that no such journey had taken place, I published, in the month of October 1850, the results of my investigations*. The consequences of this publication were very different in England and in France. In the latter country, M. d'Abbadie, who was a member of the Council of the Geographical Society there, was able to exercise an influence on that body more powerful than that of Mr. Ayrton on the Society in London. The Bulletin of the French Society had long been opened to direct attacks on me, whilst communi- cations from myself were refused insertion ; and my remon- strances against this injustice only resulted in his being allowed to continue his attacks anonymously, or rather in the name of the Society itself instead of his own. Under such circumstances, I felt that I owed it to myself to return to that Society the gold medal which it had awarded to me in 1846, which I did on the 2nd of December, 1850. In this country, on the contrary, M. d'Abbadie lost favour ; Mr. Ayrton left the Council of the Royal Geographical Society ; and the President, in his next Anniversary Address (1851), made the following pointed observation : "I shall not here allude to the controversial disputes which have so greatly mystified the rise and course of that wonderful river the Nile ; but must unhesitatingly express my own conviction that NO EU- ROPEAN TRAVELLER, FROM BRUCE DOWNWARDS, HAS YET SEEN ITS TRUE souRCE."f And, when referring to the discovery * An Enquiry into M. Antoine d'Abbadie's Journey to Kaffa to discover the Source of the Nile: 8vo, 1850; 2nd edition, 1851. t These capitals are Admiral Smyth's. He has lately informed me that, having in the year 1817 expressed to the Admiralty his opinion that we must look south of the line for the Western Nile of Herodotus (see his ' Mediter- ranean,' p. 488), his firmly grounded conviction on this point was the cause of his strong assertion in thus addressing the Society. 14 of " Kenia^ another stupendous eminence covered with eternal snows," he gave it as his opinion that the inland districts of Eastern Africa, visited by the Missionaries, " must be recognized as part of Uniamesi, or the Country of the Moon," and that " these elevated ranges appeared to be in the vicinity of the spot where the source of Bahr el Abyad, or White Nile, would be found."* This, it will be perceived, though I was not named, was a direct and favourable allusion to my hypothesis of 1846. I would here direct your Lordship's attention to another pas- sage in the President's Address, as especially pertinent at the present moment. After congratulating the Society on " the learned and lucid dissertation" which Colonel (now Sir Henry) Ra'wlinson, one of the Council, had read before the Society, on the identification of the Biblical Cities of Assyria, and on the geography of the Lower Tigris, Captain Smyth adverted to the advance of the land at the head of the Persian Gulf "at the extraordinary degree of a mile in thirty years, a rate of increase probably about twice that of the growth of the Sunderbunds or any other known delta ; " and he added, " This agrees, in fact, with the statements which Dr. Beke, one of your Fellows, pub- lished in the ' Philosophical Magazine/ as far back as February 1834, and in his ' Origines Biblicae' in the same year."f This should not be lost sight of now that my views in Biblical Geography and History, made public so many years ago, are being stigmatized as " crotchets." The next President, Sir Roderick Murchison, went very much further than his predecessor, Admiral Smyth, expressing himself (1852) in the following terms: "Wherever the sources of the Nile may ultimately be fixed and defined, we are now pretty well assured that they lie in lofty mountains at no great distance from the east coast. In the absence of adequate data, we are not yet entitled to speculate too confidently on the true sources of the White Nile ; but, judging from the observations of the mission- aries, Krapf and Rebmann, and the position of the snow-capped mountains called Kilimanjaro and Kenia (only distant from the eastern sea about 300 miles), it may be said that there is no ex- ploration in Africa to which greater value would be attached * Journ. Roy. Geogr. Soc. vol. xxi. p. Ixxxviii. t Ibid. p. Ixxx. 15 than an ascent of them from the east coast, possibly from near Mombas. [The very journey which I had projected for Dr. Bial- loblotzky in 1848.] The adventurous travellers who shall first lay down the true position of these equatorial snowy mountains (to which our Abyssinian Medallist, Dr. Beke, has often directed public attention), and who shall satisfy us that they not only throw off the waters of the White Nile to the north, but some to the east, and will further answer the query whether they may not also shed off other streams to a great lacustrine and sandy inte- rior of this continent, will be justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age to geographical science !"* In the following year (1853) I left England for Mauritius, remaining abroad till near the end of 1860 ; and as I was thus altogether out of the scientific world, and took no part in its pro- ceedings, I need not trouble your Lordship with any further references to the Addresses of your predecessors in the Presi- dential Chair. On my return to England, I found that during my absence the current of opinions had been running counter to the hypo- thesis I had so long maintained. Others had obtained possession of the field, and I seemed quite lost sight of and (so to say) for- gotten. I thought therefore that, in justice to the Royal Geo- graphical Society not less than to myself, I ought again to place my views prominently before the Society; and accordingly I prepared a paper " On the Mountains forming the Eastern side of the Basin of the Nile, and the origin of the designation 1 Mountains of the Moon ' as applied to them ;" which I sub- mitted to the Society on the 10th of May, 186 1, but which, after having been kept on hand upwards of three months and a half, was returned to me on the 30th of August following, barely in time to be read by me at the Meeting of the British Association at Manchesterf. No reasons were given me for the rejection of my paper ; neither did I, nor do I now, seek to question the * Joum. Roy. Geogr. Soc. vol. xxii. pp. cxxiii, cxxiv. \ An abstract of this paper is printed in the ' Report of the British Associ- ation' for 1861, Transactions of the Sections, pp. 184, 185. It was published in extenso in the 'Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal' for October 1861, new series, vol. xiv. pp. 240-254. 16 decision of the Council. But I am bound to state that, in the opinion of many competent judges, the paper is of value and most suitable for insertion in the Society's Journal ; and I am willing to believe that, if your Lordship will condescend to peruse the copy of it sent herewith, you will agree that there are in it many interesting and novel particulars most pertinent to the existing state of our knowledge of Eastern Africa. I did not for a moment imagine that the feelings of any member of the Council opposed to myself personally could have caused the rejection of my paper, and I regret even now to be forced to entertain such an idea. Still, when I see a member of the Council openly arrayed against me, and recollect the course of events when Mr. Ayrton was acting in the double character of my opponent and one of my judges, I cannot but have my misgivings. I have therefore decided on adopting the straightforward course of making the present communication to your Lordship. In doing so, I do not, however, ask you to take any action on it as far as I am concerned, but leave it to you to act in such manner as you may deem advisable.* I have the honour, &c. * The paper which occasioned this letter to Lord Ashburton was eventually read before the Society on the 16th of June, 1862, and printed in the 32nd volume of the Society's Journal (pp. 76-100), under the title of " Notes on an Excursion to Harran, in Padan Aram, and thence over Mount Gilead and the Jordan to Shechem." BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Vol. I. 8vo, with a Map, Price Seven Shillings, ORIGINES BIBLIC^E, OR RESEARCHES IN PRIMEVAL HISTORY. The Author's views in Scripture History, Geography, and Ethnology are fully enunciated in this volume, though the second, intended to con- tain their further development, has not appeared. 8vo, with Six Maps, Price Six Shillings, THE SOURCES OF THE NILE ; BEING A GENERAL SURVEY OP THE BASIN OF THAT RIVER AND OF ITS HEAD STREAMS ; WITH THE HISTOEY OF NILOTIC DISCOVEEY. Pamphlet, 2nd Edition, Price One Shilling, THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH IN THE RED SEA. Pamphlet, 2nd Edition, Price One Shilling, A FEW WORDS WITH BISHOP COLENSO ON THE SUBJECT OP THE EXODUS OF THE ISRAELITES AND THE POSITION OF MOUNT SINAI. TAYLOR AND FRANCIS, RED LION COURT, FLEET STREET; AND WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN. UtiiO 000 61 1 485