Pliny (v. i) places his Gir (which some editions read “Niger”) “some distance” beyond the snowy Atlas.  Ptolemy (iv. 6) tells us “in Mediterranea vero fluunt amnes maximi, nempe Gir conjungens Usargalam montem et vallem Garamanticam, a quo divertens amnis continet secundum situm (east longitude) 42deg. (north latitude)—­ 16deg..”  Again:  “Et Nigir fluvius jungens et ipse Mandrum” (Mandara, south of Lake Chad?) “et Thala montes” (the range near the western coast on the parallel of Cabo Blanco?).  “Facit autem et hic Nigritem Paludem” (Lake Dibbie or Debu, north-east of Sego and Sansanding?) cujus situs 15deg.-18deg..”

Here the Gir, Ger, Gar, or Geir is clearly laid down as a Mediterranean stream, whilst “Niger” gave rise to the confusion of the Senegal with the true Niger.  The name has greatly exercised commentators’ ingenuity.  D’Anville believes the Niger and the Gir to end in the same quarter of Africa, and the latter to be entirely unknown.  Gosselin, agreeing with Pliny, whose Ger is the Nigir of the Greeks, places them south of the Atlas.  Mr. Leake (loc. cit.) holds all conjecture useless.  Not so the Rev. M. Tristram, whose geography is of the ornithological or bird’s-eye order.  In “The Great Sahara” (pp. 362-4, Appendix I.), he asks, “May not the name Giris or Gir be connected with Djidi?” i. e. the Wadi Mzi, a mean sink in El Areg, south of Algeria.  Graberg ("Morocco”) had already identified it with the Ghir, which flows through Sagelmessa; Burckhardt with the Jir, “a large stream coming from about north latitude 10deg., and flowing north-west through the Wadai, west of the borders of Dar-Fur.”  No wonder that some geographers are disposed to believe Gir, Giris, Ger, and Geir to be “a general native name for a river, like Ba” (Bahr), “Bi” (in many Central African tongues a river, Schweinfurth, ii. 241), “Quorra (Kwara), Gulbi and Gambaru (the Yeou), Shadda, and Enzaddi.”

It is still interesting to consider the circumstances which gave rise to Captain Tuckey’s disastrous expedition.  As any map of Africa during the early quarter of the present century, Bowdich or Dupuis for instance, may prove, the course of the Niger was laid down, now according to the ancients, then after Arab information.  The Dark Continent, of which D’Anville justly said that writers abused, “pour ainsi dire, de la vaste carriere que l’interieur y laissait prendre” ("Mem. de l’Acad. des Inscriptions,” xxvi. 61), had not been subjected to scientific analysis; this was reserved for the Presidential Address to the Royal Geographical Society by the late Sir R. I. Murchison, 1852.  Geographers did not see how to pass the Niger through the” Kong Mountains, which, uniting with the Jebel Komri, are supposed to run in one unbroken chain across the continent;” and these Lunar Mountains of the Moslems, which were “stretched like a chaplet of beads from east to west,” undoubtedly express, as M. du Chaillu contends, a real feature, the double versant, probably a mere wave of ground between the