On Tuesday night Mr. Roosevelt lectured to an audience of
four thousand persons at the National Geographical Society in New York on his discoveries in Brazil. He described the "Davide," or river of doubt, which be had "placed on the map," as about nine hundred and thirty-five miles in length, running from just south of the 13th degree to north of the 5th degree. Though it was the largest affluent of the Madeira, its upper course was hitherto utterly unknown to every one, and its lower course, though known for years to rubber men, was utterly unknown to all cartographers, whether French, British, German, or Brazilian. A large part of his lecture was devoted to exposing the errors of the standard maps, which were "preposterously wrong," marking in one case a valley as a mountain, and omitting two rivers with waterfalls of one hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty feet high. As for the suggestion that the river they descended was a forest flood, he observed: " Floods do not stand at a steep angle of descent, and they do not extend to cover a distance of nine hundred or a thousand miles. Another suggestion is that the river might be either the Madeira or the Tapajose. My companion Fiala went down the Tapajose, Miller went down the Madeira, and we went down the river in between."
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