Thirteen years ago (1889) a Frenchman named De Bissy completed the largest map yet made of Africa.  In the preparation of this great work, which occupied much of his time for eight years, he used as his sources of information nearly eighteen hundred route and other maps, nearly all of which were the result of the work of explorers in the preceding quarter of a century.  All that we know of the geography of over three-fourths of Africa is the work of the past half-century since Livingstone made his first journey in 1849; and we know far more of inner Africa to-day than was known of inner North America three hundred years after Columbus discovered the western world.  A little over a century ago, our great-grandfathers were reading in their school geographies that North America had no conspicuous mountains except the Alleghanies; and these mountains and the Andes of South America were believed to be one and the same chain, interrupted by the Gulf of Mexico.  Many men not yet bent with years can remember when the interior of Africa was a white space on the maps; but it is not possible to-day to make such a geographical blunder as we have mentioned, about any part of Africa.

It is because of the work he did in those twenty years, sowing all the while the seeds from which sprang the great African Movement, that “the gentle master of African exploration” is acclaimed to-day as one of the world’s great men, and that his body rests in Westminster Abbey among the illustrious dead of Britain.

The son of a worthy weaver in Blantyre, Scotland, Livingstone’s early life was that of a poor boy, working in a spinning-mill, quiet, sober, affectionate, and faithful in every relation of life.  Moved at last by the thirst for knowledge that has distinguished many a humble Scotch boy, he entered the University at Glasgow, studying during the winter months and spending the summers at his trade in the factory, fitting himself all the while for the conquests he little dreamed he was to achieve over difficulties almost insurmountable.  A classmate spoke of him as a pale, thin, retiring young man, but frank and most kind-hearted, ready for any good and useful work, even for chopping the University fuel and grinding wheat for the bread.  In 1838, when he was twenty-five years old, he went to London to be examined as a candidate for the African missionary service.  Two years later he was sent to South Africa, where for eight or nine years he labored among the natives earnestly and unostentatiously north of the place now famous as the site of the Kimberley diamond mines.  It was here that he became intimately acquainted with the celebrated missionary, Robert Moffatt, whose daughter he married.  His devoted wife accompanied him in some of his later travels, but long before he finished his work her body was laid to rest under the shade of a tree that for years was pointed out to all visitors to the Lower Zambesi.