With regard to geography, perhaps the contradiction which was afforded by the various sources whence we derived our knowledge of the character of the interior of Africa, and of the course of, next to the Nile, the most renowned, and, as was considered from the same accounts, the greatest river of that country, have in late times given unlimited zest in the pursuit of further information, and has not in the least detracted from the pleasure with which we find that we are indebted to our countrymen for the solution of this all-absorbing problem.  It appears, that among the ancients many facts connected with the geography of the interior of Africa were well known, which have still been an object of discussion among the moderns; and of these, we may enumerate the occurrence of a large lake or marsh (for it is either, at different seasons of the year), whose real existence, beyond the speculations of geographers, was very unsatisfactorily established, until the journey of Denham and Clapperton; and the fact of the occurrence of a great river in the west, emptying itself into the ocean, though many were of opinion that it lost itself in an inland marsh, or in the desert, while others supported the opinion of its identity with the Nile of the Egyptians.  The researches of Ptolemy and the Arabian geographers on the Nile of the Negroes, and in later times the travels of Leo Africanus, who was a Moor of Grenada, demonstrated the absurdity of this opinion; and how extraordinary that, in the boasted perfection of human intellect, it should have been broached several centuries afterwards, and that the barometric levellings of Bruce should have been necessary to enforce conviction!  It is not at all improbable that Hanno, the Carthaginian, as advanced by Macqueen, reached the Bight of Benin, or of Biafra; and certainly the geographical information obtained on these countries by Herodotus and Edrisi was more accurate than the speculations of many modern geographers.  Observation had demonstrated to the moderns that no large river emptied itself into the ocean on the north-west coast, though it required a more accurate acquaintance with the Senegal and the Gambia before it was fully ascertained that they were not the outlets of this great stream.  The progress of navigation along the south-eastern shores of Africa also showed that no large river emptied itself into the sea along that coast; while the settlements of the Portuguese on the coast to the south of Cape Lopez, led them, at an early period, to adopt the opinion afterwards supported by Mungo Park and Mr. Barrow, that one or more of the rivers in their vicinity were the outlets of the great river of the interior of Africa.  Two celebrated geographers, D’Anville and Major Rennell, however, espoused the theory of the waters emptying themselves into the Wangara, or great marsh; which argument underwent various modifications in the hands of different geographers; and though the probability of its emptying itself into the Gulf