From The Spectator.

DU CHAILLU'S EQUATORIAL AFRICA.* THIS volume will not disappoint the unusual expectations it has excited. The region traversed by its author has not, indeed, the peculiar fascination of that which still encloses the mysterious sources of the Nile, but, except in this respect, it is not surpassed in the striking character of its natural features, by any portion of Africa with which the researches of travellers have as yet made us acquainted; while the strange and hitherto unknown animals which dispute with scarcely less extraordinary human inhabitants, its untamed solitudes, invest it with an interest to which no other portion of the globe at present affords a parallel. Unfortunately the qualifications which make a good traveller do not necessarily enable him to describe what he has seen, and we could point to more than one dull and confused volume of African exploration which has done little more than furnish materials for further condensation by more practised hands, and of which, owing to its bad execution, the popularity has been by no means commensurate with the advantage of its subject. Let us hasten to say that the literary merit of Mr. Du Chaillu's volume is all that could possibly be wished, and that in this large volume of four hundred and seventy pages we have not found one which we were inclined to skip. The care with which he kept his journal from day to day, during his progress, a task than which it is scarcely possible to conceive any thing more trying, has given his work a freshness and liveliness of detail which is of the very highest value. We seem to get the impression of all he witnessed with the same clearness with which it passed through his mind, and his judgment in the selection and arrangement of his materials cannot be too highly praised. The usual fault of travellers who are inexperienced as writers, he has entirely avoided that of following too servilely the course of a diary, and presenting various minute particulars which ought to be brought together in the same scattered way in which they were at first picked up. In the main portion of

Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Aƒrica; with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and other Animals. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. With Map and illustrations. John Murray.

the book he has given the narrative of his actual progress, with the stirring episodes with which it was enlivened, but on other subjects, such as those of climate, of government, and the slave system, of the native superstitions, of the customs of the more remarkable tribes, and of some of the principal animals he encountered, he has classified his observations in separate chapters, and has thus been enabled to steer clear of much useless repetition.

Those who look on a map of Africa will observe on its western coast the mouths of several rivers which empty themselves into the sea within one or two degrees of the equator. It was through the country watered by these streams and their tributaries that the journeys of Mr. Du Chaillu extended; his respective limits being about one hundred miles north, and one hundred and fifty south of the line; while the distance to which he penetrated into the interior seems to have been about three hundred and twenty miles, which is about one-sixth of the diameter of the continent at that point. His explorations were accomplished in five or six distinct trips, after each of which he returned to the coast to make a fresh start on the next occasion, a plan necessitated by the limited supplies of food to be obtained, and the impossibility of taking enough clothes to stand for any time the wear and tear of the almost impenetrable jungle.

On his first journey, which is interesting enough in his account, but less remarkable than some of his subsequent ones, it is not requisite to dwell, except to draw attention to the peculiarities of African commerce. This is conducted on a system which forms almost a complete bar to the development of the resources of the country, and until some more effectual way of getting at them than at present exists is opened, neither Christianity nor civilization will have much chance of penetrating more than a few miles inland. The rivers are the highways of trade, and their banks are possessed by several different tribes, through each of which every article has to pass before it can reach the hands of the captain who wants to buy it. The finder of a tusk two hundred miles from the coast is not allowed to take it himself to market; he must transmit it through all the people who lie between, each of whom takes a percentage of the profit. The sys

tem is not only one of commission but of trust; neither the first, nor any succeeding middleman, having the slightest security for the goods from those to whom they are passed on; so that if the various percentages take all the profit, as is frequently the case, the unfortunate owner has to go without altogether. He never sees the white trader who is ultimately to receive his merchandise, and is easily made to believe the most absurd tales of his cruelty and fraud. Neither is honesty the best policy, for if a man is shrewd enough to get more than is considered his fair share of trade, by means of fair dealing, he is "blacked " as we should say, and may, perhaps, pay the penalty with his life. The white men also throw much temptation in the way of the natives by entrusting them with large quantities of goods on barter, which they sometimes keep till the trader is tired out, or suffering from the climate, and then put him off with a very slight equivalent. The whole system is utterly disorganized, and is likely to remain so till the merchants themselves succeed in reaching the head-quarters whence the produce comes, which it is possible that Mr. Du Chaillu's exploits may now show them how to accomplish.

Our author's next journey was to a remarkable range of mountains extending north and south about sixty miles from the coast, called the Sierra del Crystal, beyond which live the Fans, a tribe as to whose cannibal propensities he wished to satisfy himself. His doubts were set at rest the moment he entered one of their villages, for he met a woman carrying a piece of a human thigh, and saw human bones lying about in all directions, a body having just been divided. The diet seemed to agree with them, for they were the finest set of negroes he met with in the interior, and in the way their settlements were gradually extending towards the coast there was perceptibly a more enterprising spirit than is shown by any other tribe. They are also very warlike, and excellent workers of the iron which, in the shape of ore, is found all over their country, and which, by a tedious process, they work up into a much better article than that which comes to them from Europe. Their cannibalism is the most repulsive form of that practice we have ever heard of, for they eat the bodies of people who have

died of disease, buy the dead of other tribes, and, like veritable ghouls, have been known to steal freshly buried bodies from the cemetery, and cook and eat them, or smoke and carry them away into the woods. Yet, notwithstanding this horrible custom, Mr. Du Chaillu thought them the most promising of all the tribes he met with; they have courage and ingenuity, and treated him with unvarying hospitality and kindness.

The Fans were the most remarkable of all the tribes visited by Mr. Du Chaillu, but he came in contact with a vast variety of others, whose characteristics he minutely describes. For these we must in general refer the reader to the volume itself. The impression left on us by what he says about them is that either his tact, firmness, and management was much greater than that of any traveller except Livingstone, or that the natives of the Western coast are easier to deal with when they are fully convinced that no interference with their trading monopoly is intended. In no case did the traveller meet with any gratuitous molestation, and among several tribes who had never seen a white man he was considered as the "spirit" who made all the guns and beads which were brought to Africa. He generally met with the greatest hospitality, was tenderly nursed in several attacks of fever, and on more than one occasion left the whole of his property in the charge of natives with perfect safety. The men whom he employed to assist him in hunting and to carry the immense amount of luggage, provisions, etc., which he always had to take with him, acted with entire fidelity and devotion to his interests. And nothing appears to have delayed his progress in either of the directions in which he penetrated furthest, but the natural obstacles of the country-the thick forests, the constant difficulty of obtaining food, the gradual exhaustion of means of barter, and his disinclination to trust himself among unknown tribes with insufficient supplies and diminished ammunition. Mr. Du Chaillu says, in his preface, that one of his objects was to ascertain whether any location could be found suited for a missionary station. He does not state the conclusion at which he arrived on this point, but from his account of the Ashira, a tribe inhabiting a large and fertile prairie about a hundred and twenty miles from the coast, disposed to regard the

The most interesting part of Mr. Du Chaillu's discoveries relates, however, not to the men, but to the beasts-apparently so closely related to them. He met with three new species of apes, two of which are very remarkable indeed; and has enlarged and most materially corrected our knowledge of another, probably the most extraordinary kind existing. One of the two former is the "koolookamba," which in outward appearance is more like the human species than any of its genus yet known to naturalists. Its skull has not the usual receding shape, but is domical in form, while the facial angle is to that of the chimpanzee as fifty-seven to fifty-four-the facial angle of the negro being seventy-five, and of the Caucasian skull eighty-six. Its cranial capacity is greater than that of any other ape; its face is bare, its muzzle less prominent, and fringed by something like whiskers. The ears are very like those of man, but their position, which is high, diminishes the resemblance. Mr. Du Chaillu was at once struck with its likeness to an Esquimaux or a Chinese; but the animal is extremely rare, and he was able only to procure one specimen. Another kind, also first discovered by him, is the "Nieshgo-mbouvè," an ape which builds for itself a shelter in trees, woven of leaves, in the exact shape of an umbrella, very neatly made, so as to turn the rain, which, as it must be renewed, probably, every other week, shows that the animal is of rather industrious habits. At night this ape climbs up his tree, seats himself on a branch, with his head in his canopy, and reposes securely by throwing one arm round the trunk. He is docile when caught young, and Mr. Du Chaillu succeeded in taming one, which became much attached to him, and a general favorite, but died after a few months.

country of the Fans. It is not, perhaps, generally known that the name of the gorilla is by no means new, though we have never heard much about it till lately. In the voyage of Hanno, which took place, at any rate, some time before the destruction of Carthage, the geographer mentions that he passed an island containing creatures "with hairy bodies, whom the interpreters called gorillas;" that the males escaped by their great agility, climbing rocks and trees, but that he "took three women, who bit and tore" so much that it was necessary to kill them. Their skins were taken to Carthage, and, as Pliny relates, were hung in the temple of Juno, up to the capture of the city by the Romans. Later writers, one of whom is quoted in Purchas' Pilgrims, evidently not being able to make any thing of the name gorilla, changed it to "gorgons," which at once gave the story a mythical aspect. In the dissertation by Dodwell, prefixed to Hudson's" Geographi Minores"—which Mr. Du Chaillu, from his remarks on Hanno, does not seem to have seen-the meaning of the "gorgons" is discussed at great length, and Dodwell comes to the conclusion that it is a corruption of the word gorilla mentioned by Hanno, which was probably the native term for the creature caught by his sailors. There can, of course, be no doubt that Hanno picked up the word somewhere on the coast of Africa, but Mr. Du Chaillu argues that the animal itself could not be the same as that now existing under the name. The gorilla never runs away, especially when in company with its female; nor would it, he thinks, be possible to take even a female gorilla alive. It also consumes so much vegetable food that no considerable number could have found sustenance on such an island Hanno mentions.