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WHEN the doubling of the Cape has to be spoken of as an achievement of distant times, and the newlydiscovered hemisphere has a history of centuries, and the Australian continent is fast following the example-to hear of it as the last piece of momentous news in this year 1863 that the oldest and most familiar river in the world has just been fully opened to our knowledge, is something that seems to throw us back into the infancy of society. Surely there is nothing in the world that so completely unites the old and the recent as this river. At one end it belongs to Moses and Herodotus, the Sphinxes and the Pyramids; at the other, the different notable points are named after our gracious Queen, the Emperor Louis Napoleon, Sir Roderick Murchison, the Earl of Ripon, and Jordans, the Somersetshire home of the discov

nearly elapsed since James Bruce, after describing how, barefooted, he ran down the hill to the sacred spring, suffering many hard falls from the slippery bulbous roots on the surface of the soil, thus proclaimed his sensations to the world: "It is easier to guess than to describe the situation of my mind at that moment, standing in that spot which had baffled the genius, industry, and inquiry of both ancients and moderns for the course of near three thousand years. Kings had attempted this discovery at the head of armies, and each expedition was distinguished from the last only by the difference of numbers which had perished, and agreed alone in the disappointment which had uniformly and without exception followed them all. Fame, riches, and honour had been held out for a series of ages to every individual of those myriads these princes comTrue, it is not for the first time manded, without having produced that the solution of the great pro- one man capable of gratifying the blem has been announced. Apart curiosity of his sovereign, or wiping from the triumphs arrogated by off this stain upon the enterprise mere pretendors, a century has very and abilities of mankind, or adding

erer's ancestors.

Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.' By John Hanning Speke, Captain H.M. Indian Army; Fellow and Gold-medallist of the Royal Geographical Society; Hon. Corr. Member and Gold-medallist of the French Geographical Society, &c. W. Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London.

VOL. XCV.-NO. DLXXIX.

1863.