When one was “blooded” fifteen times and died, his amateur Sangrado said, “It had been better to have bled him thirty times:”  the theory was that in so hot a climate all the European blood should be replaced by African.  One of the entries in Captain Tuckey’s diary is, “Awaking extremely unwell, I directly swallowed five grains of calomel”—­a man worn out by work and sleeping in the open air!  The “Congo” sloop was moored in a reach surrounded by hills, instead of being anchored in mid stream where the current of water creates a current of air; those left behind in her died of palm wine, of visits from native women, and of exposure to the sun by day and to the nightly dews.  On the line of march the unfortunate marines wore pigtails and cocked hats; stocks and cross-belts; tight-fitting, short-waisted red coats, and knee-breeches with boots or spatter-dashes—­even the stout Lord Clyde in his latest days used to recall the miseries of his march to Margate, and declare that the horrid dress gave him more pain than anything he afterwards endured in a life-time of marching.  None seemed capable of calculating what amount of fatigue and privation the European system is able to support in the tropics.  And thus they perished, sometimes of violent bilious remittents, more often of utter weariness and starvation.  Peace to their manes!—­they did their best, and “angels can no more.”  They played for high stakes, existence against fame—­

“But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.”

“The Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire” (London, John Murray, 1818), published by permission of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, was necessarily a posthumous work.  The Introduction of eighty-two pages and the General Observations (fifty-three pages) are by anonymous hands; follow Captain Tuckey’s Narrative, Professor Smith’s Journal, and an Appendix with seven items; 1, vocabularies of the Malemba and Embomma (Fiote or Congo) languages; 2, 3, and 4, Zoology; 5, Botany; 6, Geology; and 7, Hydrography.  The most valuable is No. 5, an admirable paper entitled “Observations, Systematical and Geographical, on Professor Christian Smith’s Collection of Plants from the Vicinity of the River Congo, by Robert Brown, F.R.S.”  The “Geology,” by Mr. Charles Konig, of the British Museum, is based upon very scanty materials.  The folio must not be severely criticized; had the writers lived, they might have worked up their unfinished logs into interesting and instructive matter.  But evidently they had not prepared themselves for the work; no one knew the periods of rain at the equator; there was no linguist to avoid mistakes in the vocabulary; moreover, Professor Smith’s notes, being kept in small and ill-formed Danish characters, caused such misprints as “poppies” for papaws.  Some few of the mistakes should be noticed for the benefit of students.  The expedition