limpid that it could be plainly seen lying at the bottom bleeding. Once they saw an elephant come down to bathe out of the forest. At another time fourteen of those majestic beasts were seen disporting themselves in a sandy bay, throwing jets of water in all directions. At another time they came across a wonderful waterfall, 1000 feet high, made by the river Kaigiri, which rises in the swamp which turned them out of their way on leaving M'rooli. Such were the splendid sights of their voyage.

But it was a very painful and harassing one for all that. Both still very sick, they were packed closely all day in this narrow boat, under a low awning of bullock's hide. The weather too was very miserable. Every day at one o'clock a violent tornado lashed the lake into fury, and rendered it almost impossible for a canoe to live. The second day they were nearly lost from this cause. Caught four miles from land, they had to run before it, nearly swamped every now and then by the heaviness of the swell. They however succeeded in

reaching the shore, but the boat was swamped and all the live stock drowned,--even Mrs. Baker's two little birds. At last, after thirteen days, when they had rowed for ninety miles, the lake began to contract, and vast reed-beds to fringe the shore, a mile in width, growing on floating vegetation, somewhat similar to that bridge which they were crossing when Mrs. Baker was struck down. One day large masses of this extraordinary formation were broken by a storm and carried away; floating islands of three feet thick, with growing reeds upon them, in every direction about the lake.

Preferring to find a gap in this false shore to the ordinary plan of walking over it, he coasted the floating reeds for a mile, and came to a broad, still channel, bounded with reeds on both sides. This was the embouchure of the Victoria Nile,

-the channel which connects the Albert with the Victoria N'yanza. Its course may be now said to be 250 miles or thereabouts. It was seen for the first fifty miles of its course from the Ripon Falls to Nyamionjo, by Speke, in August 1862. The next sixty miles want verifying. From twenty miles above Kamrasi's to fifteen miles below the Karuma Falls, a distance of ninety miles, it is tolerably accurately known by Speke and Baker. The next forty miles are described as a succession of cataracts. The last few miles, from the Murchison Falls to the Great New Lake, has been sailed up by Mr. Baker, so that of the guessed 250 miles of the course of the Victoria Nile, only 50 require verifying, and of this part there is no doubt. It would not be worth while to send an expedition merely for that purpose. The object of any

fresh expedition must be to get afloat on this great Albert N'yanza, and examine its affluents. It is possible that one of them may be larger than the Victoria Nile, though on the whole inprobable. There can be no great lake to the westward. But is it within the wildest bounds of possibility that Lake Tanganyika can communicate with the Albert? We dare not speculate, but we are, on the whole, inclined to say that it is impossible. We only call attention to the fact, that, as far as we know, the great Albert N'yanza turns westward, nearly in the latitude of Mount M'Fumbiro. Is it not sent westward by a spur from that undoubtedly great mountain? If so, it is a most singular confirmation of Mr. Baker's speculations. Is or is not M'Fumbiro one of the peaks of the equatorial watershed of Africa? If so, to what point would this trend--west and a little north? Where does that lead one ? To the Cameroons to begin with, and then on to that great rib of the earth which makes the great promontory of Africa, which thrusts itself into the Atlantic at Cape Verde, and refuses to end even there, but protests against the ocean in the islands of St. Jago and St. Antonio, and once more emerges from the deep at Barbadoes. Curious it would be, if one could persuade the Guinea niggers' of Barbadoes that they were still on their native hills, but it looks very like fact.

It does not come within our province to follow Mr. Baker any further. The duty we undertook was that of telling our readers what Mr. Baker had done towards adding to our geographical knowledge. In fulfilling our task it was necessary to dwell very much on the personal element in his narrative, as showing, in justice to himself, the desperate circumstances with which he had to contend. It would be unfair to him to give in précis the account of his struggle from Magungo back to Gondokoro-to Khartoum-to Cairo. The scientific interest in his story ends at Magungo, the rest a mere personal adventure; a mere story of hope deferred so long that she gave way to her sister despair; a mere tale of starvation, fever, and misery of every kind. Our object in this article is not to put lazy people so far au fuit with the story as to be able to talk about it at the dinner table, but rather to induce them to read it. So, having done all we proposed to do about the book, we leave off at this point, assuring our readers that, as far as adventure goes, the latter part of the work is more deeply in teresting than the part we have noticed.

ART. VI.-1. Report of the Royal Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Nature, Circumstances, and Origin of the Disturbances in Jamaica.

1866.

2. An Act to make Provision for the Government of Jamaica.

1866.

3. Papers presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, relating to the Affairs of Jamaica. 1864. 4. Further Papers relating to the Affairs of New Zealand, presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. 1866.

5. Report of Select Committee appointed to consider the State of the •British Settlements in the Western Coast of Africa-ordered by the House of Commons to be printed. June 24, 1865.

SERVILE insurrections and proconsular delinquencies not unfrequently reminded the Roman that he was the citizen of a vast Empire. It is perhaps partly due to the simultaneous recurrence at the present day of political visitations of a similar nature, that our Colonial policy now claims and receives from Parliament and the country a measure of consideration which contrasts rather strikingly with the indifference exhibited in more quiet times towards a department of public affairs supposed to be drifting altogether from our cognisance and control. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, who was very recently supposed to enjoy a sinecure, has, for the present at all events, enough employment on his hands.

Passing events in Jamaica and New Zealand, the important political and military questions arising out of the defence and government of British North America, the constitutional dispute in Victoria, the embarrassing aspect of affairs on the Cape frontier, the recombination under one rule of our West African settlements, the peculiar and anomalous position of the Hudson's Bay territories and Vancouver's Island, these and other topics of almost equal importance have combined to attract an amount of public interest which those who have watched the previous gradual relaxation of our Imperial rule, and the consequent withdrawal of Colonial controversies from the domain of party warfare at home, would perhaps scarcely have anticipated.

Ten years ago the art of governing dependencies, like that of driving stage-coaches, seemed to be gradually losing all practical importance. If now and then a philosophical statesman produced an essay on Colonial policy, it was regarded in very much the same light as the dramatic procession with which the Four-in-hand Club occasionally enliven Hyde Park, as an unpractical display of an obsolete science. The Minister to

whom the Sovereign might intrust in those days the task of constructing a Cabinet, troubled himself very little about the personnel of the Colonial Office. Half the Colonies,' it was said, 'have demanded and obtained full powers of self-government; leave them to work out the system for themselves; and as to those over which you still retain any practical control, the less you exercise it the better. The more you interfere in their local affairs, the more trouble and expense you will entail on the Imperial Government.'

The degree of importance which was attached to this department of the public service, not only by Parliament and by the press, but by the Executive Government in the period to which we allude, may be measured by the fact that within a single year, commencing in November 1854, and ending in November 1855, the duties of Secretary of State for the Colonies were discharged by no fewer than seven successive Ministers.1 Why we retained at all a public functionary whom we could afford to shift from his post every six weeks is a question which may have suggested itself to inquiring minds, and in the recorded speeches of one of the most distinguished of these short-lived officials, arguments may be found distinctly pointing to the abolition of Colonies and Colonial Office altogether.

If the problems which have since perplexed and baffled Sir W. Molesworth's successors had been foreseen by that statesman, the anticipation would not probably have altered or materially modified the policy which he consistently advocated; but it must be admitted that our intervening Colonial annals furnish evidence enough to prove that the government of dependencies has not become a study quite so obsolete as enthusiastic Colonial reformers may at one time have anticipated. The sanguine statesmen who triumphantly founded Colonial self-government' a quarter of a century ago, and contrasted the system of which they were the sponsors with the monopolies and restrictions it superseded, fancied perhaps that they had solved, once and for ever, all the perplexities of parent States in the administration of their dependencies. Time, however, and experience, have taught us that Colonial constitutions, dashed off in the freest and boldest style by the ready pen of a Secretary of State, and conferring all but independence on our distant provinces, may yet fail to secure two cardinal conditions at least of all good government, the dignity of the ruler and the loyalty of the subject. It would no doubt be a mistake to ascribe to aristocratic reaction, or to any inherent infirmity in representa

1 The Duke of Newcastle, Sir G. Grey (with Home Office), Mr. Sidney Herbert, Lord J. Russell, Sir G. Grey again (Lord Palmerston discharging the duties), Sir W. Molesworth, Mr. Labouchere.

tive institutions, the voluntary abdications of popular rights in Colonies, of which the memorials from the province of Auckland and Vancouver's Island, and the more conspicuous political suicide of the Jamaica Legislature, afford very recent illustrations. It is nevertheless a noticeable fact that in an age presumed to be characterized by unbounded and insatiable aspirations for personal independence and civil privilege, communities differing completely in all their social conditions should almost simultaneously cast themselves on the parent State, craving a return to a condition of tutelage and political minority.

In the case of Jamaica, it would scarcely be necessary to cast about for motives of a very recondite nature influencing the handful of electors (being a proportion of about thirty to each representative, and little more than one in two hundred to the whole population of the island) in their formal renunciation of privileges which the traditions of two centuries had failed to invest with any precious associations. The contrast presented by the comparatively prosperous Crown Colonies of Ceylon, Mauritius, Trinidad, and British Guiana, which, yielding the same products, and lying within nearly the same latitudes, had not only survived the ordeals of free labour and free trade, but had attained a high average of agricultural and commercial wealth, was in itself sufficient to raise a doubt in the mind of the bankrupt Jamaica planter as to the material value of his representative institutions. A legislative assembly so absolutely intolerant of all executive control as to claim for all its members collectively the powers and functions of a Ministry of Finance, and at the same time so sublime in its conceptions of freedom as to refuse to accept responsible government on the Canadian model, as a compromise for the political chaos which made Jamaica a byword and reproach among free colonies, could scarcely be expected to survive the shock, whenever the artillery of an enlightened public opinion should be directed against a fabric so frail and indefensible. The Imperial Parliament, by indorsing the verdict by which the Jamaica Legislature had voluntarily terminated its miserable existence, has only echoed the unanimous judgment of all who have watched its gradually increasing imbecility since Lord Melbourne vainly attempted in 1839 to accomplish that which Lord Russell's Government has at last been permitted to attain in 1866. Whether the moral or material benefits we may be able to confer on Jamaica may prove equivalent to the cost of its tenure as a Crown colony, whether the mutual antagonism of the two races, aggravated by recent events, may prove a bar to any expedients for the development of its resources or the elevation of its people, are problems awaiting a solution which time only can afford.