xii INTRODUCTION.

to Egypt, and employed him upon several diplomatic missions.

In March 1878, after Gordon Pasha had been appointed Governor-General of the whole Sudan, Dr. Emin Effendi received from him the appointment of Governor of the Equatorial Province, which post he has oceupied up to the present time.”

I must quote one more passage from the German Introduction, as it refers to Dr. E. Schnitzer’s reason for adopting a Turkish name, which proceeding appears to have greatly exercised many people’s minds :— “From the very first this determined man threw himself heart and soul into his work, and as he sought a sphere of labour amongst people of foreign customs and modes of thought, he was perfectly willing to give up every external indication which might stand in the way of his obtaining an unhampered entrance into the Mohammedan world. Far away from large cities where, under the guise of fashion, European habits are continually undermining the ancient and crumbling customs of Islam, and at the same time covering them with a thick varnish, there obtains a certain distrust of a solitary European, which prevents the intimate relation that should characterise the intercourse of a doctor with suffering mankind. The German humanitarian believed it only possible to fulfil his office satisfactorily by permitting no external evidence of his Frankish origin to appear. The name he chose for this purpose was Emin, ‘the faithful one, and certainly no one has ever proved himself more worthy of bearing such a name as the description of his character. It would no doubt have been impossible for him to have done so much had he retained his German name. An extraordinary gift for the acquisition of foreign languages lightened his task, for, besides German, French, English, and Italian, he mastered several Slavonic languages, as well as Turkish and Arabic. He also commenced to learn Persian, and who knows in how many Central African dialects he may not be now at home ?