It
appears, that among the ancients many facts connected with the geography
of the interior of Africa were well known, which have still been an
object of discussion among the moderns; and of these, we may enumerate
the occurrence of a large lake or marsh (for it is either, at different
seasons of the year), whose real existence, beyond the speculations of
geographers, was very unsatisfactorily established, until the journey of
Denham and Clapperton; and the fact of the occurrence of a great river
in the west, emptying itself into the ocean, though many were of opinion
that it lost itself in an inland marsh, or in the desert, while others
supported the opinion of its identity with the Nile of the Egyptians.
The researches of Ptolemy and the Arabian geographers on the Nile of the
Negroes, and in later times the travels of Leo Africanus, who was a Moor
of Grenada, demonstrated the absurdity of this opinion; and how
extraordinary that, in the boasted perfection of human intellect, it
should have been broached several centuries afterwards, and that the
barometric levellings of Bruce should have been necessary to enforce
conviction! It is not at all improbable that Hanno, the Carthaginian, as
advanced by Macqueen, reached the Bight of Benin, or of Biafra; and
certainly the geographical information obtained on these countries by
Herodotus and Edrisi was more accurate than the speculations of many
modern geographers.
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