From the southern limits of the Sahara to the extremity of the continent, Abyssinia excepted, but the great island of Madagascar included, no race of man exists that has invented letters, built durable architectural monuments, or founded powerful commonwealths. Of the races inhabiting this territory, extending over twenty degrees of latitude, by far the most numerous and to us the most interesting is the Negro, too well known to need any description. Possessed of great bodily strength and power of supporting toil, the history of the Negroes would seem to show that their understandings are not quite in proportion to their physical qualities. No systematic and consistent form of religious belief has ever originated with a Negro people, and the object of their belief is merely a mischievous magic. This inferiority of the Negro can only be satisfactorily attributed to lack of mental power. It is this inferiority, combined with eminent capacity for mechanic labour, that has induced the powerful among themselves to make a trade in the weaker, just as other races do in cattle, and which has seduced foreign nations in all ages to engage in the hateful traffic, to abstain from which demands an amount of moral restraint not yet attained by all the nations of Europe, and reached by none of those of Asia 10,000,000 of these negroes are now in the New World and its islands, 7,000,000 of whom are slaves, to the great detriment of civilization, whether as regards the slave or his owner.

The great Malayan and Philippine Archipelagos afford many striking illustra tions of the connexion between physical geography and ethnology, and I shall adduce a few examples. The Island of Java, of volcanic formation, has a range of high mountains extending from one end to the other. These supply rich plains and valleys with an abundant perennial irrigation, making this island one of the most fertile spots on the globe. In form, Java is a long narrow island; and although of half the size of Britain, no part of it is above fifty miles distant from the sea. Its peaceful and docile inhabitants, at present about 12,000,000 in number, have immemorially been in possession of letters of their own invention, and their country contains beautiful architectural monuments, while the political institutions of the Javanese prove by their results that they gave no inconsiderable amount of protection to life and property. After referring to the contrast shown by Borneo, another of the islands of the Archipelago, owing to its physical inferiority, he continued:

The Malay peninsula, fully double the size of Java, with some advantage over it in shape, is generally of the same geological formation with Borneo; and as to minerals, it is rich in tin, iron, and gold. Like Borneo, it is covered by a dense tropical forest, always, as already stated, a serious and almost insuperable obstacle to the early progress of civilization. The native inhabitants are of the same race as the Borneans, but even lower in the order of civilization. Immediately east of Java are two small islands, Bali and Lombok, of the same geographical formation with that island, and, like it, having high ranges of mountains, the source of an abundant irrigation. Of the same race with the Javanese and Borneans, they have letters and monuments, and are virtually in the same state of advancement as the Javanese. Their population, computed at 1,000,000, is probably equal to that of all Borneo. The Malayan peninsula and some of the Philippine Islands exhibit a phenomenon unknown in any other part of the world-that of two distinct races of men, dwelling, but not intermixing, in one and the same land. These are the Malayan and a diminutive Negro, the latter leading an erratic life in the mountains, in as wild a state as that of any tribe of Americans, and the first with more or less civilization—even possessing a knowledge of letters. The islands of the Pacific, from New Guinea to the Feejee group, are peopled by negroes, always in a lower condition than the brown race which peoples the neighbouring islands, and the greater number of their inhabitants are certainly cannibals. Voyagers have noticed one favourable distinction between these negroes and the brown and more civilized race-they were always found honest, while the fairer people were invariably incorrigible thieves. The brown race in question, proved, by identity of physical form and language, to be the same from the Sandwich to the New Zealand Islands, were found on their discovery (the last-named islands excepted) in a higher state of civilization than any native people of America, except those inhabiting the plateau of the Andes. This advancement they owed to the possession of such cultivated plants as the yam, the batata, the bread-fruit, the taro or caladium, the

cocoa-nut, and the sugar-cane, with such domestic animals as the dog, the hog, and common fowl. But, like the rudest Americans, they had no domestic animals for labour, and were ignorant of iron and every other metal. Notwithstanding, therefore, a fertile soil and mild climate, cut off, as they were, from all intercourse with more civilized strangers, they could not be expected to have gone beyond the point of civilization which they were found to have attained when Europeans first saw them. Such of them as had no domestic animals, or not an adequate supply of them, were undoubtedly cannibals. The people of the Sandwich Islands-now Christians -certainly were so but eighty years ago.

Advancing to higher civilizations, I may begin with the Persian. Persia is a plateau generally rising about 3000 feet above the level of the sea. The greater part of it is within the temperate region, but a considerable portion subtropical. It has many deserts and salt lakes. In these deserts the fertile spots, that is, those that are supplied with water, are few in comparison. To this general character, however, the lands bordering on the Caspian, copiously irrigated from a range of high mountains, are an exception, for they are eminently fertile. The Persian race is a peculiar one, and among Asiatics a highly endowed one, personally and intellectually. For five-and-twenty centuries, and probably even a longer time, it has been in possession of letters and the skill to erect durable monuments. But the physical geography of the country is certainly a serious impediment to a stable and lasting civilization, for it not only encourages the invasion, but the permanent settlement within its borders of pastoral tribes, still retaining their nomadic habits. These wandering tribes, differing in language and manners from the Persians, are estimated to amount to a fourth part of the population. This is as if one-fourth part of the population of England were to consist of armed gipsies. My next example is the country of the Hindus, a land which nourishes two hundred millions of men, but which, like much of Africa and of Australia; would assuredly have been but an arid desert, with pastoral tribes wandering over it, had it not been for the Himalayas and the Ghauts, the sources of those great rivers which have given it soil, irrigation, and means of intercommunication. Hindustan is almost as unbroken a mass of land as Africa itself, and more so than Australia; and the amount of this disadvantage may be estimated by the fact that its coast-line is less than that of Britain, of one-fifteenth part its extent. Throughout Hindustan the race of man is probably, in all essentials, the same, with such varieties only as preval among Europeans, Negroes, and the red man of America. The Hindus are a black people, of a deeper tint than any other race of man, the African and Oriental Negro and Australian excepted. The form of the head and features is European--even of the highest type, the Grecian: but experience teaches us that there must be an essential difference in the quality of the two brains, although too subtle for anatomy to detect. There is, in fact, no rational foundation for the extravagant theory which would make Hindus and Europeans to be of one and the same race, under the absurd and hypothetical designation of Caucasian: twenty centuries of history belie the assertion. Above two thousand years ago the Hindus were, according to the measure of Asiatic civilization, a highly advanced people, and possessing the evidences of it in indigenous written language, architectural monuments, and institutions of some skill and great persistency.

We come next to the highest civilization of Asia, that of China, the joint result of superiority of race and favourable physical geography. The high mountainchains of China, often rising to the snow-level, and chiefly lying to the west, are the sources of the great rivers which fertilize spacious alluvial plains, and nourish millions of men. It was no doubt in these plains that first sprang up the peculiar civilization which has spread over a region twenty times the extent of Britain, and numbering fully sixteen times its population. With respect to the quality of the race itself, it far exceeds all other Asiatic ones in bodily strength, in capacity for labour, in ingenuity, and in power of supporting vicissitudes of climate, for we find it thriving alike under the heat of the equator and the cold of the fiftieth degree of latitude. It is almost superfluous to add that their knowledge of letters, peculiarly their own, is of immemorial antiquity. For ages, too, they have had the capacity to erect great and enduring structures. Their foolish wall, to keep out the shepherds of Tartary, and compared to which, in magnitude at least, the Pyramids of Egypt are but mole-hills, was constructed two hundred years before the birth of Christ.

The superiority of their political institutions is proved by its fruits-a progress in the useful arts and an accumulation of wealth which have never existed in any other Asiatic nation. In China, as in India and as in the region which lies between both, we find rude, unlettered tribes, who, although of the same race as the Chinese, have not participated in their civilization. These mountaineers-for such they ne cessarily are chiefly abound in the less favoured provinces of the west, where the great rivers have not yet attained the magnitude which confers fertility and means of internal communication. From the Sea of Japan to the Caspian there exists a vast region, for the most part steppes and sands. This is the native country of the Tartars and Turcomans-of men who, for the most part, dwell in tents, and whose normal condition is as migratory as that of birds of passage. Immemorially i possession of the horse, the camel, and the sheep, the very physical character of their country would seem to condemn them in perpetuity to the pastoral condition. The huge peninsula of Arabia, although a tropical or subtropical country, much resembles Tartary, in the frequency of its deserts and the fewness of its fertile or watered spots. The habits of its inhabitants, therefore, were generally pastoral, like those of the Turks and Tartars. The highest civilization which the Turks ever attained was in Eastern Europe and in Northern India; the highest which the Tartars reached was in China, and of the Arabs in Spain.

Europe is the quarter of the globe which, through the great advantages of supe rior physical geography and superior quality of race, has attained the highest measure of civilization. Its extensive seaboard, caused by deep gulfs and inland seas: its numerous lakes and rivers; its many islands, with a temperate climate, afford it means of industry, commerce, and intercommunication possessed by no other part of the world. The superiority of its races of man is attested by an experience of three thousand years. In the quality of these races among themselves there is, probably, no material difference; sufficiently proved by the fact that no deterioration follows their intermixture, as shown in the instances of the very bastard people whom we call French and English. The term Europe, however, is but a conventional and not a very well-defined one, and the advantages of physical geography and race which I have ascribed to it belong especially to the southern portion, always its only seats of high civilization. The sterile and oft ice-bound far North has never produced, and seems incapable of producing, a great and powerful civilization. Yet from the rigorous North has emanated one of the most highly-endowed races of manthat which overthrew the huge structure of the Roman Empire, which in later times conquered a large portion of France and the whole of Britain, and to which, above all other causes, is owing the vigorous civilization of modern Europe and Northern America. The vast superiority of the European over the other races of man, and especially over the precocious but soon stagnant races of Asia, need not be insisted on at length, and I shall confine myself to a few modern instances. Thus, but for the European race, the old and new world would have been unknown to each other: that race has conquered the whole new world and largely peopled it with men more civilized, more powerful, and far more numerous than its aboriginal inhabitants. But for the European race, China would have been known to the rest of the world only by report, and Japan and the great Indian Archipelago as unknown as America. While the European nations have virtually subdued all America, discovered and conquered a fifth quarter of the globe, Australia, and conquered and occupied a considerable part of Asia, no foreign race can be said to have invaded and permanently settled in Europe. The Turks conquered the weakest and most degenerate portion of Europe, and beyond this they have never succeeded in penetrating, notwithstanding many attempts. They have been in Eastern Europe about half the time that the Saracens had been in Spain, but, in the true character of an Oriental race, they either refuse or are unable to keep pace with the European races, and, now existing only by their sufferance, absorption or expulsion is their inevitable

fate.

The races of Asia (and it affords incontestable evidence of incapacity and inaptitude) have borrowed little from Europe. I can quote but two notable exceptionsfire-arms and tobacco, both of which they promptly adopted on the first opportunity. They reject the printing-press, obstinately persevering in the slow and expensive manuscript which in Europe impeded the progress of knowledge 500 years ago. They very rarely use the mariner's compass, but steer along the shore, or trust to

the stars and the monsoons. The European races have, on the contrary, borrowed freely from every country that had anything good to give. From Asia the list of our adoptions is large, for from it we have derived cotton and the cotton manufacture, silk and the silk manufacture, paper, without which the printing-press would be worthless, the sugar-cane and its extracts, tea, coffee, spices, and opium. Nor must the domestic fowl be omitted, for that valuable acquisition is of Asiatic origin. To America we owe the potato, maize, the cinchona, the tobacco, and the turkey, and to Asia and America jointly all our most valuable dyes. To Africa our obligations are smaller; but palm oil, the gallina, and the ass may be named with respect. As to the invention of written language and to monuments of a high order, the only parts of Europe which boast of having possessed them are Greece and Italy, which in the march of civilization had so long preceded all the rest. The nations of Europe, now the foremost in letters, were (the Runic characters excepted, which probably never extended beyond the priesthood) as ignorant of them 2000 years ago as were the Mexicans when first seen by Europeans. In this respect, as indeed in architecture, they have been but dextrous imitators. This is a striking contrast to the precocious races of Asia, many rude tribes of whom, less civilized than ancient Gauls, Germans, and Britons, have been in possession of alphabets of their own invention from time immemorial.

The most favoured parts of Europe, even those which are now the seats of the highest civilization, afford, like India and China, examples of civilization retarded through disadvantage of physical geography, without any proved inferiority of race. Our own island yields two signal instances, Wales and the Highlands of Scotland. Had the whole area of Britain been no better than they, it is quite certain that we could not have been what we are-powerful, opulent, populous, and great. Their inhabitants, compared with those of the fruitful parts of the island, were as the Gonds and Garrows of India to the Hindus, or the Myo-tse of China to the Chinese. From their courage and locality they were difficult to subdue, and their unavoidable poverty offered no temptation. It is only by slow degrees, and the influence and example of a more advanced nation, that a people so circumstanced is brought within the pale of civilization. The process is, at present, in rapid advancement in the mountains of Wales and Scotland, even to the extinction of their barbarous although masculine and forcible tongues; but it has taken eighteen centuries to bring the Welsh and Highlanders to their present state from that which they were in when Gibbon describes one of them (and the other was probably little better) as consisting of "troops of naked barbarians," who "chased the deer of the forest over cold and lonely heaths, amid gloomy hills and lakes covered with a blue mist.”

Journey in the Interior of Japan, with the Ascent of Fusiyama. By R. ALCOCK.

The paper commenced with a description of the difficulties which the writer encountered in Yeddo, in the early part of his journey in Japan. A large retinue accompanied him. The journey was begun in September 1860. On their way they had to cross the river Saki on the shoulders of porters, who were made responsible for the safety of the passengers; if any accident occurred to the travellers, the men had nothing to do but to drown themselves, as no excuse was taken. At first their way up the mountain lay through waving fields of corn, succeeded by a belt of high rank grass. Soon, however, they entered the margin of the wood which surrounded the base, and which crept high up the side of the mountain. At first they found trees of large growth-goodly timber of the oak, the pine, and the beech. At Hachimondo they left their horses and the last trace of permanent habitations and the haunts of men. Soon after the wood became thinner and more stunted in growth, while the cork and birch took the place of the oak and the pine. Just before they entered the forest-ground a lark rose on the wing-the first the author had ever seen or heard in Japan. As a general rule, the birds had no song, the flowers no fragrance, and fruit and vegetables no savour or delicacy. In the wood-belt were deer, wild boars, and horses. They soon afterwards lost all traces of life, vegetable or animal. On their journey they rested a little in huts or caves, partly dug out of the side and roofed. There were eleven of these resting-places, which were one or two miles apart, between Hachimondo and the summit of the mountain. The latter half of the journey was the most arduous. On the top of

the mountain was a yawning crater-a great oval opening with jagged lips, estimated at about 1100 yards in length, with a mean width of 600, and about 350 in depth. Looking from the mountain, the country below was hid by a canopy of cloud. The estimated height of the edge of the crater above the level of the sea was 13,977 feet, and the highest peak 14,177 feet. The Japanese who performed the pilgrimage were generally dressed in white vestments, which on the summit were stamped with various seals and images by the priests located there during the season. A far as the writer could learn, a very holy man, the founder of the Sintoo religion, took up his residence on the mountain, and his spirit was still held to have influence to bestow health and other blessings on those who made the pilgrimage. The volcano had long been extinct. The latest eruption recorded was in 1707; and the tradition was that the mountain itself rose in a single night from the bowels of the earth, a lake of equal dimensions appearing the same hour at Miaco. The time occupied by the ascent of the mountain was eight hours, and the descent was secomplished in little more than three hours. The party slept two nights on the mountain, and had greatly to congratulate themselves on the weather.

On Australia, including the Recent Explorations of Mr. Macdonald Stuart. By the Hon. J. BAKER, F.R.G.S.

Mr. Baker gave a rapid sketch of the rise of the colonies of Australia and the habits of the aboriginal inhabitants. During the last year or two, the amount of gold discovered had rather diminished than increased; and a considerable number of hands were now employed in cultivating the soil who were previously engaged in the diggings. All other exports were gradually increasing, and only population was required to enlarge them to an almost unlimited extent. There were numerous rich mineral deposits, and many places in which cotton might be grown with advantage. There was not a more loyal people under the sun than the Australian colonists. Mr. Baker then gave a few extracts from Mr. Stuart's journal of his last expedition into the interior. After noticing the starting of the expedition, on the 2nd March, 1860, and the successive visits to Mount Hamilton, and Beresford, Williams, Milne's, Keckwick, and other springs, the character of the country at the West Neale, Frero, the Stevenson, Mount Humphries, the High Gum Creek, &c., the arrival of the traveller at a small gum-creek under Mount Stuart on the 22nd of April was referred to-that being found, from observation of the sun, to be the centre of Australia. A tree was there marked, and the British flag planted. It was a mistake to suppose that the flowers in that country had no smell, a rose being found with a sweet, strong perfume. Subsequent interesting adventures were sketched, and the third unsuccessful attempt of the traveller to make the Victoria River was alluded to, the journal concluding with the arrival of the party at Chambers Creek.

On the Mountains forming the Eastern Side of the Basin of the Nile, and the Origin of the Designation Mountains of the Moon,' as applied to them*. By CHARLES T. BEKE, Ph.D., F.S.A., F.R.G.S. &c.

This paper was in continuation of the author's communications to the British Association in the years 1846, 1848 and 1851†.

It commenced by stating that the great additions made to our geographical knowledge since the date of the author's previous communications have all tended to establish the substantial truth of the opinions therein expressed.

In 1846 Dr. Beke described the Abessinian table-land as having its summit-line towards the sea-coast, and thence falling gradually towards the Nile; which river skirts the western flank of the high land, and is the sink into which all the rivers flowing over the table-land are received. The fall of the Nile is so small, that Dr. Beke then estimated its absolute elevation, in the fifth parallel of north latitude, * Printed in extenso in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal' for October, 1861, new series, vol. xiv. pp. 240-254.

+ See Report of the British Association' for 1846, Transactions of the Sections, pp. 70– 72; Report for 1848, Transactions of the Sections, pp. 63, 64; Report for 1851, Transactions of the Sections, p. 84.