The Church Missionary Atlas; Containing an Account of the Various Countries in Which the Church Missionary Society Labours, and of the

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AFRICA. Africa has been described as one universal den of desolation, misery, and crime; and certainly of all the divisions of the globe it has always had an unfortunate pre-eminence in degradation, wretchedness, and woe. The founders of the Church Missionary Society, commiserating the condition of the people, and more particularly of the Negro race, on account of the cruel wrongs which the slave-trade had inflicted upon them, selected Africa as their first field of missionary enterprise. The Continent of Africa is equal in area to Europe and North America combined, comprising nearly 12,000,000 square miles. Its greatest length is 5000 miles, and its greatest breadth 4600. Both Tropics cross it, and the Equator cuts it a little below the centre. By far the larger portion of its territory is therefore inter-tropical. I. Geographical Exploration Op Africa. In its physical configuration Africa has been compared to an inverted . . . dish, suggesting the idea of a somewhat uniform tableland dishinUl skirted round its seaboard with a narrow strip of lowlands. But the comparison is inaccurate, the mass of the land standing, not at a uniform level, but at two different levels, and consequently consisting of two tablelands, a moderately elevated northern (1000 to 2000 feet), and a much higher southern (3000 to over 4000 feet). The position of the two main continental sections is also reversed, the north having it long axis disposed in the direction from west to east between Capes Verd and Guardafui (4C00 miles), while that of the southern section runs north and south from about the parallel of the Murchison Falls on the Victoria Nile to the Cape (2500 miles). Within the space of about 90 miles, between Lakes Victoria and Albert Nyanza, the Victoria Nile descends from 3800...