may be doubted if
ever Geographer went forth strengthened with so much true power. Let
us add to these a sincere trust that slavery, the "great open sore of
the world," as he called it, might under God's good guidance receive
healing at his hands; a fervent hope that others would follow him
after he had removed those difficulties which are comprised in a
profound ignorance of the physical features of a new country, and we
have the marching orders of him who left us in August 1865 never to
return alive.

Privileged to enjoy his near personal friendship for a considerable
period in Africa, and also at home, it has been easy to trace--more
especially from correspondence with him of late years--that
Livingstone wanted just some such gigantic problem as that which he
attacked at the last to measure his strength against: that he finally
overrated and overtaxed it I think all must admit.

He had not sufficiently allowed for an old wound which his
constitution received whilst battling with dysentery and fever, on his
celebrated journey across Africa, and this finally sapped his vital
powers, and, through the irritation of exhaustion, insidiously clouded
much of his happiness.

Many of his old friends were filled with anxiety when they found that
he intended to continue the investigation of the Nile sources, for the
letters sent home by Mr. Stanley raised the liveliest apprehensions,
which, alas! soon proved themselves well grounded.

The reader must be warned that, however versed in books of African
travel he may be, the very novelty of his situation amongst these
pages will render him liable perhaps to a danger which a timely word
may avert. Truly it may be said he has an _embarras de richesses!_ To
follow an explorer who by his individual exertions has filled up a
great space in the map of Africa, who has not only been the first to
set foot on the shores of vast inland seas, but who, with the simple
appliances of his bodily stature for a sounding pole and his stalwart
stride for a measuring tape, lays down new rivers by the hundreds, is
a task calculated to stagger him. It may be provoking to find
Livingstone busily engaged in bargaining for a canoe upon the shores
of Bangweolo, much as he would have secured a boat on his own native
Clyde; but it was not in his nature to be subject to those paroxysms
in which travellers too often indite their discoveries and
descriptions.

At the same time these journals will be found