The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-21 00:00:00

Dr. Beke on the Sources of the Nile.

" The quarrels of authors," which furnished the elder
Disraeli with materials for four amusing volumes, have be-
come silent in our day, or at least they are waged with so
much decorum as to have lost the piquancy which formerly
attracted public interest. The quarrels of " travellers"—
an almost equally irritabile genus—seem to be taking their
place. An explorer of unknown regions now-a-days,
after returning in safety from the multitudinous perils of
flood and field, has scarcely time to receive the
congratulations of his friends and admirers before
he is called on to face a host of assailants
who dispute the originality of his projects and the
accuracy of his conclusions, and it will often go hard with
him if his literary and dialectic skill do not correspond to
the physical courage and endurance and the fertility of re-
source, which, perhaps, have been the chief causes of his
success. Our latest African travellers, whose exploits have
reflected so much glory on their country, are no exception
to the general lot. All who take an interest in these sub-
jects are aware that the claim of Captain Speke and Captain
Grant to have solved the geographical mystory.of ages has
been warmly challenged, and among the first to deny they
had discovered the true source of the Nile was Dr. Beke,
himself a Nile explorer of long date and considerable expe-
rience. Last night the learned doctor explained his views
at length in a lecture delivered before a crowded audience
in the theatre of the London Institution. Mr. T. Baring,
M,P., the president of the institution, was in the chair, and
among those present were the hon. sec.. Mr. Tite, ALP.,
Mr. Gassiot, F.R, S., Dr. A. Smee, and the Rev. T. Burney.
Dr. Beke,:at the outset, emphatically asserted that Captain
Speke and his companions had not hit upon the true head
of the Nile, and while allowing them a certain amount of
success in tracing the course of the river northwards, claimed
to have pointed out many years ago the region in which the
river takes its rise. As most people are aware, Captain
Speke's theory is that the Nile flows from the northern end
of the Victoria Nyanza, but Dr. Beke will no more admit
this than that the river Rhone has its source in the Lake of
Geneva, because it happens to flow through it. The true
" Niliaci fontes," Dr. Beke maintains, are to be found in the
Mountains of the Moon, which, basing himself on the cele-
brated passage of Ptolemy, he contends form a meridional
and not an equatorial, range. Eighteen years ago Dr. Bete
said he had commmunicated to the Royal Geographical So-
ciety a paper on the Nile and its tributaries, in which he
had developed this theory ; but unfortunately the expedition
sent out to verify it by actual observation had failed,
from causes which had never been adequately explained.
These Mountains of the Moon, Dr. Beke, in the map which
ho exhibited in the room, makes to run from north to south,
parallel, but at some distance from the eastern coast, and the
mountains laid down in Capt. Speke's map at the north end
of Lake Tyganyika ho declared have no existence whatever
except on paper. By the removal of this range the learned
doctor would include Lake Taganyika within the limitsof
the basin of the Nile, and even allow it to contribute to t!s
streams. Without the aid of maps it is impossible to explain
fully the doctor's hypothesis ; but if those exhibited last
night were correctly drawn, the basin of the:Nile as he ima-
gined and drew it in 1849 corresponds very closely with the
limits defined by the expedition of Burton and Spek.e in 1859.
After tracing briefly the results of former exped.itions, pr,
l3exe came to that of Spoke and Grant, and while allowing