And here we may remark, that the relative rank of Timbuctoo amongst the cities of central Africa, and its present importance with reference to European objects, appear to us to be considerably overrated.  The description of Leo, in the sixteenth century, may indeed lend a colour to the brilliant anticipations in which some sanguine minds have indulged on the same subjects in the nineteenth; but with reference to the commercial pursuits of Europeans, it seems to have been forgotten, that the very circumstance which has been the foundation of the importance of Timbuctoo to the traders of Barbary, and consequently of a great portion of its fame amongst us, its frontier situation on the verge of the desert, at the extreme northern limits of the negro population, will of necessity have a contrary operation now, since a shorter and securer channel for European enterprise into the central regions of Africa has been opened by the intrepidity and perseverance of Park, from the south-western shores of the Atlantic.

Independently of this consideration, there is great reason to believe that Timbuctoo has in reality declined of late from the wealth and consequence which it appears formerly to have enjoyed.  The existence of such a state of things, as we have described, in the preceding pages, the oppositions of the Moors, the resistance of the negroes, the frequent change of masters, and the insecurity of property consequent upon these intestine struggles, would all lead directly and inevitably to this result.  That they have led to it, may be collected from other sources than Adams.  Even Park, to whom so brilliant a description of the city was given by some of his informants, was told by others that it was surpassed in opulence and size by Houssa, Walet, and probably by Jinnie.  Several instances also occur in both his missions, which prove that a considerable trade from Barbary is carried on direct from the desert to Sego and the neighbouring countries, without ever touching at Timbuctoo; and this most powerful of the states of Africa, in the sixteenth century, according to Leo, is now, in the nineteenth, to all appearance, a mere tributary dependency of a kingdom, which does not appear to have been known to Leo even by name.

Such a decline of the power and commercial importance of Timbuctoo would naturally be accompanied by a corresponding decay of the city itself; and we cannot suppose that Adams’ description of its external appearance will be rejected, on account of its improbability, by those, who recollect that Leo describes the habitations of the natives, in his time, almost in the very words of the narrative now [*], and that the flourishing cities of Sego and Sansanding appear, from Park’s account, to be built of mud, precisely in the same manner as Adams describes the houses of Timbuctoo.