monument was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey, bearing the following inscription:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

MAJOR JOHN ANDRÉ,

WHO, RAISED BY HIS MERIT, AT AN EARLY PERIOD OF HIS LIFE, TO THE rank of
ADJUTANT-GENERAL OF THE BRITISH FORCES IN AMERICA,

AND EMPLOYED IN AN IMPORTANT BUT HAZARDOUS ENTERPRISE,
FELL A SACRIFICE TO HIS ZEAL FOR HIS KING AND COUNTRY,
ON THE 2D OF OCTOBER 1780, AGED 29,

UNIVERSALLY BELOVED AND ESTEEMED BY THE ARMY IN WHICH HE SERVED,
AND LAMENTED EVEN BY HIS FOES:

HIS GRACIOUS SOVEREIGN, KING GEORGE III., HAS CAUSED THIS
MONUMENT TO BE ERECTED.

At the same time, a pension was bestowed on the mother of André ; and, in order to wipe away all stain from the family, the honour of knighthood was conferred on his brother. It may be further stated, that the remains of André, which had been buried at the place of execution, were taken up in 1821, and being removed to England, were deposited near the monument in Westminster Abbey.

It is not without a feeling of pain that we close our account of the fate of André, and turn to that of the wretch who had inveigled him to his doom. Arnold was received with favour by the British authorities, as an officer of rank who had seen fit to quit the service of the 'rebels,' and resume his allegiance. He was confirmed in his station of major-general, and was employed shortly afterwards in some military operations in Virginia. The last exploit in which he was concerned was that of attacking and destroying his native town; and it is said he enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing it burned to the ground.

At the end of the war, Arnold felt that the States were no longer safe as a home, and he removed with his family to England, where he lived unnoticed for a number of years. Subsequently, he took up his residence in St John's, New Brunswick, and carried on a trade with the West Indies. Finally, he returned to England, and died in London in 1801, aged sixty-one years. Despised by the world, and no doubt conscious of his guilt as a traitor, it is worth mentioning, as an instructive revelation of human inconsistency, that Arnold, till the last, spoke and wrote as an ill-used man. Congress had never settled his accounts, from which he certainly suffered an inexcusable injury; the error of not promoting him according to his standing as an officer, was a second ground of complaint; and to extend his catalogue of wrongs, he declared that he could not but feel offended by the alliance of the Americans with the French-a thing not reckoned upon at the beginning of the war! Such are the kind of excuses by which intense Selfishness ordinarily seeks to justify a departure from rectitude.

AFRICAN DISCOVERY.

HE vast continent of Africa, measuring 5000 miles in length, and about 4700 in its greatest breadth, and the area of which is calculated at 12,000,000 square miles, or nearly one-fourth of the entire land area of the globe, has presented greater obstacles to human enterprise than any other equal portion of the earth's surface. The peculiar physical condition of Africa has operated as one cause of her isolation from the rest of the world. The other portions of our earth situated under the tropics consist generally either of sea, or of narrow peninsular tracts of land, and clusters of islands blown upon by the sea-breeze. Africa, on the other hand, presents scarcely one gulf or sea-break in its vast outline. A consequence of this compact geographical shape of a continent, the greater part of which is within the torrid zone, is its subjection, throughout its entire extent, to the unmitigated influence of the sun's heat. All that is noxious in climate we are accustomed to associate with Africa.

Notwithstanding the difficulties which lie in the way, Africa has at all times been an object of curiosity and interest to the inhabitants of the civilised parts of the earth; and scientific zeal, the desire of extending traffic, and even the mere thirst for adventure, have prompted many expeditions for the purpose of exploring its coasts and making discoveries in its interior. The ancients appear to have acquired much knowledge of Africa, which was afterwards lost, and had to be re-acquired by the moderns for themselves. The African coasts of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were not only familiar to the ancient geographers, but were inhabited by populations which performed a conspicuous part in the general affairs of the world, and ranked high in the scale of civilisation-the

Egyptians, Carthaginians, &c. Nor, if we may believe the evidence which exists in favour of the accounts of the circumnavigation of Africa by ancient navigators, were the other coasts of the continent -those, namely, which are washed by the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean-unvisited by northern ships. Regarding the interior of Africa, too, the knowledge possessed by the ancients, although very meagre in itself, was nearly as definite as that possessed by their modern descendants, until within a comparatively recent period. As far as the northern borders of the Great Desert, their own personal observation might be said to extend; and respecting the wandering tribes of black and savage people living farther to the south, they had received many vague notices. The Nile being one of the best-known rivers of the ancient world, its origin and course were matters of great interest, and the African geography of the ancients, in general, may be said to consist of speculations respecting this extraordinary river. The first mention made of the other great African river, the Niger, is by Ptolemy, who lived seventy years after Christ.' Ptolemy believed that this river discharged itself ultimately into the Nile; others, however, did not admit this conclusion, and acknowledged that the real course of the Niger was a mystery.

Such are some of the more prominent points in the ancient geography of Africa. How wild and inaccurate must have been the notions entertained respecting the shape and total extent of the African continent, may be judged from the fact, that one geographer describes it as an irregular figure of four sides, the south side running nearly parallel to the equator, but considerably to the north of it! Others, again, held forth the fearful picture of Central Africa as a vast burning plain, in which no green thing grew, and into which no living being could penetrate; and this hypothesis of an uninhabitable torrid zone became at length the generally received

one.

The invasion of Africa by the Arab races in the seventh century wrought a great change in the condition of the northern half of the continent. Founding powerful states along the Mediterranean coasts, these enterprising Mohammedans, or Moors, as they were called, were able, by means of the camel, to effect a passage across the Desert which had baffled the ancients, and to hold intercourse with the negroes who lived on its southern border along the banks of the Niger and the shores of Lake Tchad. In some of these negro states the Arabs obtained a preponderance, and with others they carried on an influential and lucrative commerce. The consequence was a mixture of Moorish and negro blood among the inhabitants of the countries of Central Africa bordering on the Great Desert, as well as a general diffusion of certain scraps of the Mohammedan religion among the negro tribes. Hence it is that, in the innermost recesses of interior Africa at the present day, we

Outline Map of Africa, shewing the most recent discoveries.

anism, but all practising ceremonies and superstitions in which we observe the pagan spirit with a slight Mohammedan tincture.

It was not till the fifteenth century that the career of modern European discovery in Africa commenced. The Portuguese, leading the van of the nations of Europe in the great movement of maritime enterprise, selected the western coast of Africa as the most promising track along which to prosecute discovery. In the year 1433, Cape Bojador was passed by a navigator called Gilianez; and others succeeding him, passed Cape Blanco, and, exploring the entire coast of the Desert, reached at length the fertile shores of Gambia and Guinea. The sudden bending inwards of the coastline at the Gulf of Guinea gave a new direction and a new impulse to the activity of the Portuguese. Having no definite ideas of the breadth of the African continent, they imagined that, by continuing their course eastward along the gulf, they would arrive at the renowned country of the great Prester John, a fabulous personage, who was believed to reign with golden sway over an immense and rich territory, situated no one could tell exactly where, but which some contended could be no other than Abyssinia. The Portuguese, while prosecuting their discoveries along the African coast, did not neglect means for establishing a commercial intercourse with those parts of the coast which they had already explored. Settlements

or factories for the convenience of the trade in gold, ivory, gum, different kinds of timber, and eventually also in slaves, were founded at various points of the coast between Cape Verde and Biafra. Various missionary settlements were likewise founded for the dissemination of the Roman Catholic faith among the natives.

The chimera of Prester John was succeeded by the more rational hope of effecting a passage to India by the way of Southern Africa. This great feat, accordingly, was at length achieved by Vasco da Gama, who, in 1497, four years after the discovery of America by Columbus, persisted in his course to the south so far as to double the Cape of Good Hope, and point the way northward into the Indian Ocean. By his voyages and those of his successors, the eastern coast of Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope through the Mozambique Channel to the Red Sea, was soon defined as accurately as the western coast had been by the voyages of his predecessors; and thus the entire outline and shape of the African continent were at length made known. This great service to science and to the human race was rendered, it ought to be remarked, by the Portuguese, who may be said to have conducted the enterprise of the circumnavigation of Africa from its beginning to its end; and this is perhaps the greatest contribution which the Portuguese, as a nation, have made to the general fund of human knowledge.

The outline of Africa having thus been laid down on the maps, and the extent of its surface ascertained, the attention of discoverers was next turned to its interior. The efforts made by the Portuguese to explore Nigritia in search of Prester John have been already alluded to; but it was by the other nations of Europe, especially