INTRODUCTION. xix

It is greatly to be regretted, that the premature deaths of Captain Pearce

and Dr. Morrison have deprived the world of many beautiful specimens of art,

and many valuable acquisitions to the stores of natural history. Among the

vegetable products of the tropical regions of North Africa, which, from the

general descriptions here and there given, are of great beauty and fertility,

there are no doubt to be found many new and valuable species; the whole

line from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo being entirely untrodden ground,

consisting of every variety of feature, mostly left in a state of nature, and a

great portion of it covered with magnificent forests.

Various notices are given, in the Journal, of two objects of peculiar interest,

which are still left open for further investigation; the course and termination

of the river which has been (improperly, as it now appears) called the Niger,

and the recovery of the papers, which still exist, of the late Mungo Park. The

exact spot on which he perished, and the manner of his death, are now ascer-

tained with precision. The former of these inquiries will now be considered,

perhaps, to have lost much of its original interest, by the deflection which that

river takes from its easterly into that of a southerly course ; and which, in point

of fact and strict propriety, has destroyed every pretension to its continuing

the name of Niger. It cannot be supposed that either Herodotus, or Ptolemy,

or Pliny, or any Greek or Roman writer whatever, could have had the slightest

intimation of such a river as this, so far to the westward and to the southward

of the Great Desert, of the crossing of which by any of the ancient travellers

there does not exist the slightest testimony. The name of Quorra, or Cowarra,

by which it is known universally in Soudan, and probably also to the westward

of Timbuctoo, ought now, therefore, to be adopted on our charts of Africa.

With regard to its termination, the reports continue to be contradictory,

and the question is still open to conjecture. Its direction, as far as has now

been ascertained, points to the Bight of Benin ; but there is still a considerable

distance, and a deep range of granite mountains intervening, between the point

to which with any certainty it has been traced, and the sea-coast. If, however,

it be the fact, that the river of Benin has been traced as high up as is marked

on the chart (and it is taken from an old chart of the year 1753, stated to

have been engraved for Postlethwayte’s Dictionary), that distance, between

the lowest ascertained point of the Quorra and the highest of the Benin, is