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: INTRODUCTION QANY books have been written upon Africa. Some are devoted to one part of the vast continent, and some to another. Several writers have confined themselves to the countries they have explored, while others have treated of the ethnology, physiology, and language of the various peoples. It is no mean task to search out the most interesting facts about Africa and gather them all together as links in a golden chain to bind the burning records of missionary trials, and triumphs. In the volume before us the author pictures the Dark Continent with facile pen, tenderly tracing the variations of nature in the fauna and flora from north to south and from -east to west. He turns the veil of the past aside, and we catch a glimpse of the Midnight Empire of yesterday, and speculate upon its dim and buried past—its civilization, commercial influence, military power, and lapse into heathenism. The ancient history of Africa and the record of the Mohammedan aggression and possession, with their commercial and religious influence and slave trade, are interesting and instructive. The period of early European exploration and individual adventures, together with the later explorations in which I have been personally interested, are chained together in delightful vein. As the pages roll by we peruse the somber records of heathen Africa and the government of its barbaric potentates, military methods, religions and superstitions, social customs, slavery, and the horrors of human sacrifice. The sections devoted to missionary trials and triumphs in Africa arc of world-wide importance. The barriers encountered—the climate, the geographical difficulties, languages, witchcraft, and polygamy, and the prejudices of dense ignorance and savage natures-—are recorded with the convincing t...