newspaper, telegraphic and cable communication with all the world, and industrial schools in which the manual arts are taught to hundreds of natives.  Here is the large brick church, now famous, built by native craftsmen, who before Livingstone’s time had never seen a white man, and lived in a state of barbarism; an edifice that would adorn the suburbs of any American city, and of which the explorer, Joseph Thomson, said:  “It is the most wonderful sight I have seen in Africa.”  The natives made the brick, burned the lime, sawed and hewed the timbers, and erected the building to the driving of the last nail.  They had the capacity, and it was evoked by the genius of one of the most remarkable men in Africa, Missionary Scott of Blantyre.  Steamboats are afloat on five of the six important seas of the great lake region of Central Africa; on two of the three which Livingstone discovered.  Only a beginning has been made, for the field stretches from ocean to ocean; but the man who, in 1873—­the year of Livingstone’s death,—­should have predicted one-half of the achievement of the present generation would have been laughed at as a crack-brained visionary.

Even the surface of Africa is changing, and the truth of Livingstone is not always the truth of to-day.  In his first journey, in which he braved the perils of the South African thirst lands, he reached the broad and placid expanse of Lake Ngami, covering an area of three hundred square miles.  In the gradual desiccation of that region, the lake has now entirely disappeared.  Its place is wholly occupied by a partly marshy plain covered with reeds, and no vestige of water surface is to be seen.  He found the little Lake Dilolo so exactly balanced on a flat plain between two great river systems that one stream from the lake flowed north to the Congo and another south to the Zambesi; but for years past there has been no connection between the lake and the Congo.  He sought in vain, like many explorers after him, for the outlet to Lake Tanganyika.  The mystery was not solved till, more than twenty years after, Burton discovered the lake; the solution came when the explorer Thomson and Missionary Hore found the waters of Tanganyika pouring in a perfect torrent down the valley of the Lukuga to the Congo.  The explanation of the strange phenomenon is that for a series of years the evaporation exceeds the water receipts, the level of the lake steadily falls, and the valley of the Lukuga becomes choked with grass; then a period follows when the water receipts exceed the evaporation, and the waters rise, burst through the barriers of vegetation in the Lukuga, and are carried to the Congo once more.