There are no good natural harbors except Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa, but by great expenditure the harbors of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, and Durban have been adapted for great commerce.  Many persons mistakenly regard Cape Town as the chief commercial centre of South Africa.  It is so only in respect of the export of gold and diamonds.  As it is not centrally situated for business with the interior, more of the things that South Africa sells to and buys from the rest of the world, excepting gold and diamonds, pass through Port Elizabeth than through any other port.  Here is centred the largest wholesale trade.

What South Africa needs is more railroads and more white labor.  Manufacturing industries on an important scale are yet to come, for as yet the white population is too sparse to develop anything but the natural products of the country.

The broad summing up of the future work in Africa is that the native will be taught to help himself.  The destiny of the continent depends largely upon his development, for great parts of Africa may never be adapted to become the home of many white men.  The most powerful motives, philanthropic and selfish, incite and will sustain the work of helping these millions to rise to a higher plane of humanity.  This work, now well begun, is the great task which in the present century will call for all the knowledge, patience, humanity, and justice that may be brought to bear upon the problem of reclaiming Africa.

AUTHORITIES.

Livingstone’s “Missionary Travels,” “A Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi,” and “Last Journeys;” Blaikie’s “Livingstone’s Personal Life;” Stanley’s “How I found Livingstone.”

Stanley’s “Through the Dark Continent,” “The Congo and the Founding of its Free State,” “In Darkest Africa;” Schweinfurth’s “The Heart of Africa;” Burton’s “The Lake Regions of Central Africa;” Speke’s “Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile;” Thomson’s “To the Central African Lakes and Back;” Barth’s “Travels and Discoveries in Central Africa;” Theal’s “Compendium of South African History;” Greswell’s “Geography of Africa South of the Zambesi”; Noble’s “The Redemption of Africa” (A History of African Missions).

No comprehensive compendium of the history of African exploration has yet been written.  Our knowledge of the geography, peoples and resources of Africa is treated with considerable detail in a number of works such as Reclus’s “Africa” (in “The Earth and Its Inhabitants”) and Sievers’s “Afrika” (German).  A very large part of the exploratory enterprises in Africa have not been described in books, but only in the reports of the explorers, printed with their original maps in the publications of many geographical and missionary societies.

SIR AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD.

1817-1894.

MODERN ARCHAEOLOGY.