mankind, and it can justly be
said that his labors were the first to lift the veil from the 'Dark
Continent.'"

During the thirty years of his work he explored alone over one-third of
the vast continent; a feat which no single explorer has ever equalled.
But it must be remembered that even though he had severed his connection
with the missionary society that he regarded himself to the last as a
"Pioneer Missionary."

One of the most fascinating subjects of controversy since the time of
Herodotus was the problem of the source of the Nile. Poetry, from the
description of the Garden of Eden and the writings of Ptolemy to the
Kubla Kahn of Coleridge, ran rife over the four fountains out of which
flowed the wonderful river. To Livingstone was reserved the supreme
honor of settling for all time the secret of this most poetic river of
mystery. Long ere this he had been honored with a gold medal from the
Royal Geographical Society. How futile must the bit of metal have seemed
to this dark, silent man, whose mind had grown away from bauble and
tinsel, and who had learned in the silences the real value of the
trinkets of the world.

When he had discovered the Victoria Falls, he had completed in two years
and a half the most remarkable and most fruitful journey on record,
reconstructed the map of Africa, and given the world some of the most
valuable land it ever could possess. The vast commercial fields of ivory
were opened up to trade; the magnificent power of the Victoria Falls
laid bare to the sight of civilized man. We can imagine him standing on
the brink of the thunderous cataract of the Victoria gazing at its
waters as they dashed and roared over the brink of the precipice,

"--Like stout Cortez--when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

To this man, who had opened up a continent; who had penetrated not only
into the heart of the forest, but had made himself one with the savages
who were its denizens; who knew and understood them as human beings, and
not as beasts, the slavery trade was, as he expressed it, "the open sore
of Africa." Over and again he voiced his belief that the Negro freeman
was a hundred times more valuable than the slave. He repeatedly enjoined
those who had the fitting out of his expeditions not to send him slaves
to accompany him on his journeys, but freemen, as they were more
trustwort