ONE of the wonders of the nineteenth century is the opening of the continent of Africa to the world. The epoch of discovery began barely thirty-five years ago with Livingstone, and is so far completed that few, if any, mysteries remain to the explorer. The sources of the Nile and of the Kongo, the systems of lakes and mountains, and the general character of the country and people of the great interior, are no longer questions of speculation, but of actual knowledge. Discovery has solved the old enigmas of this mysterious continent, and the latest maps have no “gaps,” like those of Swift’s day, to be filled with “savage pictures,” and with conjectures. We know that the interior is not a burning desert, nor a steaming morass exhaling death to all but native tribes, but much of it high and salubrious ground, covered with luxuriant forests, watered by copious rains, and tempered by mountains and great lakes. Keltie’s maps, representing the sum of latest information, show that the annual rainfall is between forty-eight and eighty inches in a belt ten degrees wide, extending from coast to coast across the continent just north of the equator. This belt also extends ten degrees south of the equator, from the great lakes to the East Coast. The rest of Southern Africa, excepting the Kalahari Desert and a strip north, or the West Coast, receives from twenty-four to forty-eight inches of rain. Excepting this desert region, nearly all of South Africa is represented in the vegetation map as “cultivable land and woodland,” together with all Sûdan. Most of the Kongo Free State is heavily wooded, and lies at a low elevation (500 to 2,000 feet), while all the rest of the continent to the south and east ranges from 2,000 to 5,000 feet above the level of the sea, with considerable portions above 5,000. Moreover, the meteorological charts show that the mean annual temperature ranges from sixty in Cape Colony to eighty at the equator. If the discoverers have made the map of Africa in a single generation, the greedy powers of Europe have changed it in less than a decade. Division has followed hard upon discovery, and there remain no unappropriated spots south of the equator, and not many north of it. The European possessions before555this partition were scarcely more than dots on the coast outline of the continent. England had Cape Colony and small areas on the West Coast; Portugal had two narrow sea-coast strips in South Africa and a speck of land in Upper Guinea; France had Algeria, Senegal, and Gabûn, and Spain had Corisco. Germany and Italy had nothing. Now these six powers, with the independent States, divide the continent, excepting Egypt, Egyptian Sûdan, Tripoli, Morocco, and part of the Great Desert. France has the lion’s share. Beginning with Tunis and Algiers, on the Mediterranean, its territory runs south to Lake Tchad, thence west to the coast above Sierra Leone, embracing most of the Great Desert, Senegal, part of the Gold Coast, and a small strip next to British Lagos, on the Guinea Coast. In this immense stretch of country, 1,700 by 2,000 miles in extent, France has a possession equal to two-thirds of the area of the United States, including Alaska. She has also the colony north of the Kongo, giving her in all nearly 2,800,000 square miles of African territory, or nearly one-fourth of the entire continent. Great Britain has, of course, Cape Colony and a broad belt extending northward to the southern limit of the Kongo Free State and Lake Tanganyika, bounded on the left by German and Portuguese territory and on the right by Portuguese East Africa. It has the southern coast to the Orange River on the west, and to the Kosi River, just below Delagoa Bay, on the east. The rest of its immense South African possession is interior territory. British East Africa begins on the coast at a point above Zanzibar and extends northward to the southern boundary of the Italian protectorate, stretching into the interior as far as the Victoria Nyanza, the shores of the upper half of which it embraces, and thence northward to the country of the Mahdi. There is, besides, the north Somali coast, on the Gulf of Aden. On the West Coast are the Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Gold Coast colonies, and the Niger and Oil River protectorates. This is all of British Africa. In extent it is a little smaller (though far more valuable) than French Africa, embracing about 2,500,000 square miles. If Egypt be regarded as a British protectorate, the area of the two powers in Africa is about the same. The British territory, however, has a third more of population than the French. Next in territorial extent comes Portugal, with a coast line in East Africa of about eleven hundred miles, from Cape Delegado south to the Kosi River, and with a still larger possession south of the Kongo on the West Coast, and a small colony in Guinea. Its possessions aggregate 841,000 square miles. Germany is fourth, with 822,000 square miles. It has Togoland, in Guinea, the Cameroon country, just north of French Kongo, a large territory on the southwest coast extending north from Orange River to Portuguese Angola, and a possession in West Africa, stretching along the coast from Cape Delegado north to Pongwe, and into the interior to the borders of the Kongo Free State and the Victoria Nyanza. For the rest, the Kongo Free State embraces 864,000 square miles. Italy has Abyssinia, Erythrea on the Red Sea, and Somaliland on the West Coast—602,000 square miles; Spain has a protectorate north of Senegal, and a claim on a small portion of French Kongo—214,000 square miles. The Republics of Liberia, Orange Free State, and the Transvaal, complete appropriated Africa. Of course the tribes go with the territory. The number of souls belonging to each division is not known in many cases. The protectorates are too new for the census man. He must wait for the railroads. There are steamers in the rivers and lakes; but the pioneer railroad along the lower Kongo is not yet ready. Civilized powers, however, control the continent, and we may expect that they will introduce so much of civilization as will suffice to develop commerce. In this the natives must be the prime factor. Savagery, and particularly slavery, are barriers which will need to be removed, and in the end they will be removed. Christianity and commerce will be the chief agents in accomplishing this great work for humanity.—The Independent.