AFRICA, in its geography and history, is marked with wonders. Some portions of it were among the first to be explored and occupied by man, while others long remained untraversed, and some continue to the present day to be marked on the map as unknown regions. In the early ages, it was the seat and cen - tre of learning and science, while the mass of its inhabitants have ever been shrouded in intellectual and moral darkness. Africa presents the most remarkable contrasts of fertility and desolation, the valley of the Nile, and the mighty wastes of Sahara. In its zoology, it not only affords the ostrich, the lion, the tiger, the elephant, and the rhinoceros, animals common to the adjacent regions of Asia,-but the giraffe and the hippopotamus, which are peculiar to this quarter of the globe. In surveying its civil and social condition, we see the negroes, a weak and harmless race, made the prey the Arab, the most despotic and remorseless of the human family. The lion, the leopard, and the panther, feasting upon the vast herds of antelopes that graze over the central wastes of Africa, afford a striking analogy to the state of human society; the weak, the timid, and the defenceless being made, without mercy or scruple, the prey of the daring and the strong. of Africa is a vast peninsula, attached to the eastern continent by the narrow isthmus of Suez. It is situated between 34° south, and 37° 30′ north latitude. Its length is 4,320 miles, and its utmost width 4,140. Its shape is triangular, and bears a resemblance to an irregular pyramid, of which the Barbary States form the base, and the Cape of Good Hope the apex. Its extent is about 12,000,000 square miles, and its population about 60,000,000. The prevailing aspect of Africa is rude, gloomy, and sterile. It may be considered as, in all respects, the least favored quarter of the globe. The character of desert, which is elsewhere only partial and occasional, belongs to a large portion of its widely extended sur face. Boundless plains, exposed to the vertical rays of a tropical sun, are deprived of all the moisture necessary to cover them with vegetation. Moving sands, tossed by the winds, and whirling in eddies, surround and threaten to bury the traveller, in his lengthened route over these trackless deserts. The best known and the most fertile portion is that which borders the Mediterranean on the north. That part of Africa, however, which will most attract the attention of the reader, is Egypt. The recent discoveries in that country have startled this age of wonders, as if a new revelation had been vouchsafed to man. We are told that when the French philosophers, who accompanied Bonaparte in his expedition, stood amid the ruins of Thebes, they looked up to the gigantic monuments covered with hieroglyphics, and said, "Could we decipher these, we would prove the Bible to be a fable." The key to these mysterious writings has been found, and the infidel boast has been confounded by the discovery that they afford the most remarkable confirmations of the truth of holy writ. Thus, while the science of geology, once looked upon with fear, as threatening to overturn the Mosaic history of the beginning of the world, has yielded its testimony to the veracity of the inspired volume, and taught us to read the story of our globe in the mountain and valley, in the rock and the sand-heap; the tombs of Egypt, buried in oblivion for thousands of years, have found a voice, and, in revealing to us the lost lore of antiquity, have added their testimony to the veracity of the Bible. If the generation of the Pharaohs could now rise from the dead, we could not better be told the way |