THE FOUNDATION OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA.
The Foundation of British East Africa. By Professor J. W. Gregory, D.Sc. (H. Marshall and Son. Gs.) — Professor Gregory has produced a very readable work in this volume, which, being popular in its scope, is rightly free from the burden of unnecessary references and deterrent scientific detail. He is, we believe, the first writer who has really done justice to the enterprise of the Suahili explorers of Masailand and the unknown North ; Kamtina, Knptao of Mombasa, and the adventurous Ferhaji of Pangani had traversed Masailand, Kavirondo, Laikipia, and Sotik, and penetrated to the Turkana country and Lake Rudolf long before Fischer, Thomson, and Teleki had made their celebrated journeys. Chaps. 10-12 deal with the sanguinary and perturbed history of Uganda from MS to the present time, and they are well prefaced by the Suahili proverb, " People were told ' go and dwell '; they were not told go and struggle together for the mastery..'" No Englishman can feel any great. satisfaction at the results of missionary rivalries and Foreign Office administration, and it is sad to think that Professor Gregory's hero, Captain (now General Sir) F. D. Lngard, was denounced, by Protestant and Catholic teachers alike, as a murderer and a liar, and that Sir H. Colville's and Colonel Macdonald's reversal of the policy of peaceful develop- ment should have driven that gallant officer, the late Major Thruston, to confess that his position in Unyoro was that of " a captain of Bashi-Bazouks, a raider, and an ivory thief." It must not be inferred that the author is hostile to missionaries in general; on the contrary, he pays a deserved tribute to the ardent piety and self-s icrificing energy of New, Krapf, and Rebmann, whose lives and labours recall the devotion of the men who first spread Christianity in Northern Europe. The book is well
illustrated, and the chapters dealing with the geography and ethnology of the country are worthy of their distinguished author, whose explorations of the "Rift Valley" have abed so much light on East African geographical and geological problems.
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