The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-09-27
The Present ana Prospective Fruits of
Livingst0ne's Triumph.

Livingstone's Triumph.
It is the misfortune of almost every genera
ton to dote over the deeds of remote and by
gone ages and 10 depreciate its own. The ex-
PLOTS which most affect the worlds destiny do
not it is true. b. ray their significance by
flash and need TO be scanned and interpreted
in tho calm light of human history. The
great man whose name heads this article may
not live to discover the true import of his own
achievements. and certainly, in the course of
nature, cannot hope to reap the harvest which
he has sown.
The great impediment to the realization of
the tolls of such man as Livingstone lies in
the incredulity of the human mind. The
world is not deficient in the supply of a nu-
merous class who resemble the pertinacious
King of Anam, who refused to believe that
water sometimes froze in Europe, because it
had never been known to freeze in Anam.
When Sir John Ross in 1918 penetrated far
within the Arctic circle he found O fine tribe
OF savages inhabiting region of icy grandeur
between the prongs of the Greenland glacier,
but shut out from civilization and the sun by
the great ice wall ; and when the gallant ex-
plorer told them his ship had come from the
south they tenaciously insisted cit is not
true; there is nothing but ice there" So
intense and blind is tho resistance which
many otherwise sagacous and reasoning
minds offer to the story and conclusions of
great pioneers of science and research that
when Sir Isaac Newton, on the strictest mathe-
NAUTICAL principles, arrived at and announced
the deduction that the earth was O spheroid
many of the philosophers of the world of the
highest repute, among them tho great Ber-
noulli, entered the lists against him and
declared it on oblong figure with greater
polar than equatorial extent. The great hero
of explorations in Equatorial Africa has met
with q similar fate among the geographical
doctors and speculative scientists of his own
country but he will survive their criticisms,
and already we may begin to forecast the
fame that awaits him and the advantages
which the whole human family will ultimately
reap from his self-sacrifcing and herculean
hbors. The esteem in which geographical
discovery has ever been held may furnish some
clew to the real value of Livingstone's re-
searches. The first circumnavigator of the
globe, the indefatigable Magellan, was almost
immortalized by posterity. Sir Francis
Drake, who followed his illustrous ex-
ample, was knighted, his voyage in
the Golden Hind celebrated in song
and the famous bark thronged
by thousands of his admiring counrymen
Even in our later period, when the world is
moro phlegmatic and utilitarian, the very
bones Of lost explorer (Sir John Franklin)
were so anxiously and theoretically sought for
that in 1865 Sir Leopold McClntock esti-
mated the foot explorations accomplished in
the search, amid mountains of ice, at forty
thousand miles. History fully attests how all
geographical discovery, by its influence both
directly and Relatively not only serves to
quicken and fecundate all the sciences, but to
rouse the human mind itself from its lethargy
and introduce it to new worlds of thought.
But no portion of the earth yields such album
dant treasures to the explorer as the torrid
zone, in which lies the scene of Livingstones
exploits The tropics, as Humboldt has sug-
gested, not only give rise to the most powerful
impressions by their organic richness and fer
tilty, but they reveal to man, by the uni
fornity Of atmospheric variation and the
development of vital forces in their fauna and
fora, and by the contrasts of climate and
vegetation at different levels, the invariability
of planetary lands, mirrored, as it were, in
terrestrial phenomena. Africa is emphati-
cally the land of greatest natural
productions, of which we have here
tofore known less than we do of
the surface of the moon, and not
much more than the spectroscope has taught
us of the philosophers of the sun. Into the
most hidden wilds Of this vast land mass
nearly four times as large as Europe-the
penetrating genius of Livingstone has pushed
geographic research and planted the germs of
future civilization and empire. In solving, as
we may now justly assume he has done, the
ancient problem of the Nile, the old explorer
has produced the key with which all the
secrets of the great Southern Continent may
be unlocked and its splendid plateaux its
opulent river valleys and its chains of enor-
nous navigable lakes, seated and uncovered
high above the sea, may be thrown open to
the enterprise of all coming generations. In
large sections of this newly found world
although, like Andean South America, lying
almost under the Equator nature has piled
up upon a series Of gigantic parterres and
terraces every variety of climate and soil. and
compensated by cool and lofty elevations for
the severity Of vertical sun. If to the ma
tons of extra-tropical countries and high
ATTITUDES it seems improbable that a great civil
lization can be erected in the new world
brought to light by Livingstone, we have
only to recall the historic development of the
Equatorial South American States and of the
famous Carthagenian. Persian and Egyptian