Queen's Bench; and, during next Hilary term, the validity of the rate will be there tried.

It would be presumptuous in us to obtrude any opinion of ours in a case which will be argued by the first legal abilities, and decided by the highest judicial authorities of the realm. We shall, therefore, content ourselves with a simple recapitulation of the conclusions to which we have been led in our historical examination of the subject. We have shown,

1. That in England, as in other Christian states, churches were for many centuries repaired, and the expenses of religious worship defrayed, out of ecclesiastical funds set apart for these purposes; which funds are still enjoyed by the established clergy, or by lay improprietors possessed of what was formerly church property;

2. That churches continued to be repaired, and the expenses of public worship to be defrayed, out of these funds, after the commencement of legal memory, and, consequently, that no subsequent custom, introduced by the ecclesiastical courts, can create a liability at common law, imposing on parishioners the obligation to discharge these burdens;

3. That no statute law has imposed these burdens on parishioners;

4. That although for ages churches have been repaired, and the expenses of public worship defrayed by Church Rates, this has been done by voluntary assessments, made from time to time, as occasion required, by the churchwardens and a majority of the parishioners assembled in vestry, and in no other

way;

5. That spiritual censures are the only means of coercion which the wisdom of the law has intrusted to ecclesiastical courts.

To these conclusions we may add (what is admitted on all sides), that when the ecclesiastical authorities have attempted to impose Church Rates on a refractory parish, by appointing commissioners to rate and tax the parishioners, their attempts have been repudiated, and their commissions declared illegal by the courts of law. The substitution of churchwardens for commissioners appears to be no less an encroachment on the ancient right of the parishioners to assess themselves; and, after the judicial declarations of Lord Lyndhurst and of Baron Baillie from the bench, there seems no ground or pretext for this novelty.

VOL. LXVI. NO. CXXXIV.

Y

ART. III.-Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa, by the River Niger, in the Steam-Vessels Quorra and Alburkah, in 1832, 1833, and 1834. By MACGREGOR LAIRD and R. A. K. OLDFIELD, surviving Officers of the Expedition. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1837.

T is a remarkable fact that the quarter of the world in which I are found the most ancient monuments of civilized society, is that also which continues longest to defy the curiosity of man. Inscriptions remain which record the triumphs of the Egyptian Pharoahs nearly four thousand years ago, over Ethiopian tribes as far south as the junction of the White and Blue Rivers. At the present day our knowledge of the Ethiopian tribes extends further, perhaps, than that possessed by the Pharoahs; yet how limited is it, how indistinct and stationary, compared with every other branch of human enquiry! Not more than three centuries and a half have elapsed since the new world was discovered; within fifty years after the discovery of America, that immense continent was almost completely circumnavigated, and its coasts were delineated with wonderful accuracy, considering the resources of that age. European colonies then flowed in upon it, bringing with them the seeds of civilisation, and a new world really arose where a chaos only had been discovered. How different has been the fate of Africa? Cradling, as we have observed, four or five thousand years ago a civilisation which, though changed or obscured, has never been wholly obliterated, that portion of the globe is still but little known!

The obvious cause of our ignorance of the African continent, is the nature of the country, which presents, towards the quarters whence European travellers were most likely to arrive, obstacles not insurmountable indeed, but yet sufficient to exhaust a traveller's ordinary means, and to turn aside the current of ordinary curiosity. An immense burning desert, from six hundred to one thousand geographical miles in width, stretches from the Atlantic ocean to the Red Sea, interrupted only by the narrow valley of the Nile. The crossing of so broad a tract of parched inhospitable sand, affording neither shelter, food, nor water, is a dangerous and extremely disagreeable task, even at the present day; but in ancient times, before the camel species had been multiplied so far westward, it must have been nearly impracticable. The barbarousness of the natives has been often alleged as one cause of our imperfect acquaintance with Africa, but without due consideration. The fact is, that those natives, so far from being avoided, have been from the earliest times a chief article of commerce with those

nations who had the oportunities of appoaching them. The same peculiarities of physical constitution which prevented strangers from penetrating to the interior of that continent, condemned its aboriginal possessors to comparative barbarism, by debarring them from mixture and varied intercouse with the rest of their species; by reducing their social condition in some measure to a state of torpor; and by confining their experience wholly to the torrid zone, where nature, too vigorous to be controlled or coped with by infant art or industry, so easily keeps the upper hand.

It must not be supposed that the ancients had any knowledge of the country south of the Sahrá or Great Desert. Herodotus distinctly tells us that Lybia extends towards the south into immeasurable deserts. It was through this desert that the Nasmones, travelling westwards, arrived at a river, evidently the Niger, or more correctly Nigir, of subsequent writers. We are told by Strabo, Pliny, and their followers, that the Nigritæ, who took their name from that river, were situate between the Garamantes and the Gætuli, that is to say, between Fezzan and Morocco; and lastly, Ptolemy very clearly fixes the sources of the Nigir in the chain of Atlas, uniting, by a contrivance familiar to the first efforts of systematic geography, all the streams which flow from the southern face of those mountains into one goodly river. On this river he places Nigira Metropolis, which most modern geographers have agreed to consider as the Timbuctú of the present day; without troubling themselves with the question whether the origin of Timbuctú be not comparatively recent. Their supposition, however, obliges them to admit that Ptolemy has entirely overlooked the Great Desert-a remarkable oversight, truly, in one whose exactness in details of longitude and latitude, in the midst of enormous pervading errors, is so strenuously vindicated by his interpreters, when it serves their purpose to do so.

The Greek and Roman geographers have been sadly misquoted and misconstrued in reference to the interior of Africa and the river Nigir; and if our space or plan permitted such a digression, we could easily show from their own words, that they meant to place that river on the northern side of the Great Desert. But we shall be satisfied with citing two very explicit passages. Pliny, who is much relied on by those who maintain that the Nigir of the ancients was south of the Sahrá, relates, on the authority of King Juba, that the Nigir, after sinking in the sand, rises again and flows into the Nile. Now mark the terms in which he commences this statement:

The Nile,' he says, ' rises

' in Lower Mauritania, not far from the sea.' The same author is contented to cite Homer in support of the opinion, that beyond the Great Desert dwelt the Ethiopians or Blacks. Again, Strabo

lets fall the following significant expressions: The tribes that 6 dwell in Lybia (that is in the Desert), are but little known : they are seldom visited by strangers; and the few natives who • ever come to us from any distance have but scanty information, • and that not always credible. This, however, is the sum of their accounts. The people who are farthest to the south they call Ethiopians (or Blacks). Below (that is nearer than) these, the most considerable tribes are the Garamantes, the Pharusii, ' and the Nigritæ ; and next to these the Gætuli.' Does not this passage teach us very clearly to distinguish between the country of the Nigritæ, or of the Nigir, and that of the Ethiopians or Blacks in the remotest south?

6

In the seventh century, the Arabs first began to figure conspicuously on the stage of African affairs. Animated and united by religious enthusiasm, they conquered Egypt, whence their victorious progress extended rapidly towards the south and west. Themselves children of the Desert, inured to the hardships, and acquainted with all the resources of nomadic life, they easily and naturally bent their steps over those trackless wastes which looked so forbidding to the inhabitants of Greece and Italy. They penetrated in a short time to the Ber-es-Súdan, that is, the country of the Blacks or Negroland, of which they are entitled to be considered by us as the first discoverers. Even at the present day, after the persevering efforts made of late years, chiefly by the British, with the sacrifice of some valuable lives, for the purpose of penetrating the mysterious regions of Central Africa, there are many gaps which we are obliged to fill up entirely from the Arab writers.

The Arabs, as masters of the camel, were eminently qualified to explore a wide extent of desert country, but as writers they had little merit. They are too often dry and obscure, passing over, with the fewest words, the matters of greatest interest. There is, however, but one of their defects which needs to be animadverted on in this place. They were servile followers of Ptolemy; they copied even when they had the means of correcting him. Moreover, they often borrowed his opinions without citing his authority, and thus kept error in countenance by appearing to be independent testimonies, when they were only repeating at second hand. Among the names which they borrowed from him was that of the Nigir, which they applied of course to every considerable river met with in Negroland. Supposing, in the spirit of ignorance, that all the great streams of Central Africa, with which they had some acquaintance, but of which they knew neither the beginning nor the end, were connected together, so as to form one watery coil across the African conti

nent, from the Senegal to the Nile of Egypt, they gave to that hypothetical river, or to its several parts, with no great constancy, the name of Nigir. So long as the geography of Central Africa was wrapped in darkness, the errors of a too eager curiosity in seeking for the Nigir might be easily excused. The authority of ancient authors misunderstood, and the intrinsic wonders of the river itself, uniting, as was supposed, the waters of Western Africa with the Nile, were sufficient to dispose to credulity. But now the delusion is dispelled. We know that the great river of Negroland, the Quorra, neither sinks in the sand nor joins the Egyptian Nile, nor bears any resemblance to the Mauritanian river mentioned by the ancients; and we cannot avoid smiling at the pertinacious misapplication of a name, which entitles the exploration of a river flowing into the Bight of Benin, an expedition into the interior of Africa by the river Niger.'

The erroneous estimate formed of the knowledge which the ancients possessed of Central Africa has had occasionally its influence, no doubt, in stimulating the moderns to prosecute the discovery of that region; and on that account, as well as for the sake of deprecating the continuance of an absurd misnomer, we have made the foregoing remarks on the river Nigir. We shall now proceed briefly through the chief epochs of African discovery, till we arrive at the occasion of Mr Laird's expedition.

The discoveries of the Portuguese in the fifteenth century along the coast of Guinea, naturally directed attention to the unknown interior of Africa, and much information was collected in consequence. Some of the Portuguese adventurers penetrated a considerable way up the country; and one of them, named Fernandez, seems to have taken the same route which was subsequently trodden by Mungo Park. Under ordinary circumstances the discoveries made on the coast would have led to others further inland, until the whole country would have been at length laid open. But with the tide of events the curiosity of the European world was carried impetuously in another direction. The discovery of the Passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and soon after that of America, irresistibly seized on the minds of men, and all minor discoveries were lost sight of or completely extinguished in the splendour of these. There was a general rush to the Indies, first eastwards, afterwards to the west; and the current of popular enthusiasm continued long to run violently in the latter direction. Thus a general ardour, of which the world has never seen a second example, poured a flood of voluntary colonization into the new world, while the slender garrisons requisite for the maintenance of the Portuguese settlements on the coasts of Africa were re