I venture, therefore, to affirm that, on the theory of the upward growth of the corals during the sinking of the land, all the leading features of those wonderful structures, the lagoon-islands or atolls, as well as the no less wonderful barrier-reefs, whether encircling small islands, or stretching for hundreds of miles along the shores of a continent, are simply explained. On the other hand, coasts merely fringed by reefs cannot have subsided to any perceptible amount, and therefore they must, since the growth of their corals, either have remained stationary or have been upheaved.
The chronometrical measurements were completed in the Indian Ocean by a visit to Mauritius, and thence, voyaging around the Cape of Good Hope, to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension, in the Southern Atlantic, and to the mainland of Brazil at Bahia and Pernambuco, from which the course was set for home. The Beagle made the shores of England at Falmouth on October 2, 1836, after an absence of nearly five years.
On a retrospect, among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, including the spectacles of the Southern Cross, the Cloud of Magellan, and the other constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, the glacier leading its blue stream of ice overhanging the sea in a bold precipice, the lagoon-islands raised by the reef-building corals, the active volcano, the overwhelming effects of a violent earthquake—none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man, whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of nature. No one can stand in those solitudes unmoved and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. And so with the boundless plains of Patagonia, or when looking from the highest crest of the Cordilleras, the mind is filled with the stupendous dimensions of the surrounding masses.
FELIX DUBOIS
Timbuctoo the Mysterious
I.—From Paris to the Niger
Felix Dubois has a considerable reputation in France and on the European Continent generally as an African explorer. His sphere of travel has been confined to the Dark Continent north of the Equator. He first published in 1894 "Life on the Black Continent," but his reputation rests mainly on "Timbuctoo the Mysterious," issued in 1897, of which two English translations have appeared. Dubois' style is vivacious and picturesque, with a vein of poetic feeling in some passages. His "Early History of Northern Africa and Timbuctoo," of the architecture of which he has made a special study, is lucid; but in discussing the extension of the British and French spheres of influence and protectorates during the past century he betrays a certain measure of Gallic Anglophobia.
Having fallen asleep in a railway carriage on your departure from Paris, you awake six weeks later on a canoe-barge upon the Niger. The steamer lands you at the entrance to the Senegal, in a country which has belonged to France for centuries. The port of Senegal is Dakar, the finest harbour on the west coast of Africa, and from thence there is a railway to St. Louis. For eight days you travel up the Senegal river in a steamer to Kayes, the port and actual capital of the Sudan; and a narrow-gauge railway carries you from the Senegal to the Niger at Dioubaba.