A portion of the English press thinks that England ought to make use of Saïd Kalid's rebellion to convert Zanzibar into a crown colony, but the English government has elevated Saïd Hamoud to the sultanate. It is not easy to see what else could be done, and the advice of those papers which advocate annexation cannot be followed. England's position in Zanzibar is founded upon the treaty of 1893, by which Germany acknowledges a protectorate only. The protectorate can only be changed for something else by the same ineans by which it was established, riz., a treaty. It is quite true that Kalid is under our protection, for his offense is political. Political prisoners, it should be remembered, are not subject too extradition. This is a doctrine which England herself strenuously defended in many cases."

HAMID BIN THWAIN,

Hamoud bin Mahomed, a cousin of the late sultan, was proclaimed successor to the sultanate August 26. This prince is said to be an enlightened man, of the type of his near relative Barghash bin Saïd, the friend of Sir John Kirk, who reigned in the sixties. Hamoud is, of course, the nominee of the British government.

Uganda. The British house of commons in July approved a grant of £3,000,000, to be issued out of the consolidation fund for the construction of a railway from the island of Mombasa to Uganda, a distance of 657 miles. The first rail on the line was laid with great ceremony at Kilindini May 29. A bridge will connect Mombasa with the mainland.

The progress of "civilization" in Uganda is remarkable. A few years ago race and creed wars of extermination were the order of the day. Now peace reigns undisturbed, and the native police and the British garrison have little trouble in maintaining order everywhere. Roads are being made and towns are assuming a European air. The, chiefs and notables live in two-story houses, of brick or stone, with floors carpeted and the apartments furnished in European fashion. A burglar-proof safe-conclusive evidence of progress and civilization-stands in the office of the king's prime minister. The king himself has ordered a "brougham" from England; several of his high officers have sent for "dogcarts;" a consignment of bicycles was daily expected to arrive when the last advices came from Uganda.

The Kongo Free State.-Major Lothaire (p. 459) was again put on trial, on demand of the British government, for the killing (or execution) of the British subject Stokes. This second trial was held at Brussels, and resulted in acquittal, August 6. The judgment is very strongly censured not only in England but in Germany. The Cologne Zeitung declares that this verdict produces a situation that "virtually cancels the conditions on which the Kongo state was established and recognized by the powers. In an interview with Mr. Parminter, a former Kongo state official, that gentleman answered with great unreserve a number of searching inquiries put to him by a London Times correspondent regarding the condition. of affairs in the Kongo region.

Asked to what degree the Kongo had been opened up, he said that stations have been built and plantations made on the upper and lower Kongo, but only on the river banks. The country a little away from the river is as yet untrodden by a Belgian foot. Of barbarities alleged to have been committed on the natives, he confessed that the current reports of such doings are "too true as a whole. Since 1884 the condition of the natives has gone from bad to worse. The causes of this he refers first to the inexperience of most of the officers, and then to the impossibility of exercising control over them from headquarters. Their one dominant desire is to grow rich speedily and return home. He cites particular instances of brutality: for example, once, while in company with a military officer on board a steamer, he saw a sergeant of his command, just returned from an expedition, hold up triumphantly a string of human ears. No word of reproof was uttered by the officer: on the contrary the sergeant was praised for his good conduct. An aged chief showed to Mr. Parminter's agent at a certain station the mutilated body of his daughter, whose feet had been hacked off by the native soldiers, that they might obtain the brass anklets she wore. At another station a native sergeant exhibited to Mr. Parminter a bag containing half a dozen hands of negroes. The white officers wink at these barbarities. By order of a Belgian officer a mother and her daughter got 200 lashes with a strip of dried hippopotamus hide: he then ordered his men to mutilate the women, and left them to die. Their offense was that they would not (or could not) reveal the hiding place of the chief. Slave trading is carried on with the connivance of Belgian of ficials. "I have often seen a slave steamer coming down the river packed with slaves. The captains used to get five francs per head for slaves delivered at Kinshassa." A contribution of slaves, so many each month, is exacted from the native chiefs in certain districts. He declares that the Kongo state sells guns and powder to the natives for ivory and rubber. Just before he left the Kongo (December, 1895), the whole of the Aruwimi district had revolted and turned their arms and powder against those from whom they had purchased them.

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SCIENCE.

Arctic Exploration.-Dr. Nansen Farthest North. -The year 1895 will be forever memorable in the history of scientific progress. Following the announcement of the remarkable discovery of argon in 1894 (Vol. 5, p. 257) and of the X rays (p. 1), there came, in August of the present year, the startling announcement, subsequently fully confirmed, that on April 7, 1895, Dr. Fridtjof Nansen had succeeded in penetrating northward to latitude 86° 15'-a point nearly 200 miles nearer the north pole than any preceding explorer had reached. Hitherto the highest latitude attained had been 83° 24', reached by Lockwood and Brainard of the Greely expedition in 1882. Nansen approached to about 225 miles from the pole; and he gives it as his opinion that nothing but lack of dogs and kayaks prevented him from covering the intervening distance. His achievement opens up a new chapter in the history of arctic exploration. Without the loss of his good ship Fram, without the loss of a single human life, without any serious mishap whatsoever, even without serious discomfort, he succeeded, at a single bound as it were, in subtracting nearly 200 miles from the distance separating man's actual attainment from the final goal of arctic search. It had taken about 300 years, with enormous expenditures of money, ships, and human lives, and at the cost of untold suffering, for the accumulated labors of his predecessors to make an equivalent northward advance. From a scientific point of view the results of Nansen's expedition bid fair to be of great value. A few of its announced results are indicated below.

The wonderful story was confirmed on August 13 when the steamer Windward, which had taken supplies to the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition in Franz-Josef Land (Vol. 5, p. 724), arrived at Vardö, Norway, having on board Dr. Nansen and Lieutenant Johansen, two members of the expedition which sailed from Christiania in the Fram on June 24, 1893, and which had last been positively heard from on July 21, following, when the same vessel sailed from Vardö on its hazardous journey (Vol. 3, pp. 170, 401). On August 20, a week after Nansen's reappearance, the Fram herself, with all on board in good health and spirits, sailed into the port of Skerjvö.

It was Nansen's intention to commit his ship to the ice north of Siberia, his theory being that the ice would drift with the current (it drifts, rather, as the result showed, with prevailing winds), and that the current would carry him across the apex of the polar sea to

the Greenland coast. In a paper read before the Royal Geographical Society in London, Eng., just before his departure, he explained his theory. Enumerating the experiences of former expeditions, he showed that the polar current between Greenland and Spitzbergen carried southward between 80 and 120 cubic miles of water every twenty-four hours. Where came all this water? Mainly, he affirmed, from the Norwegian Gulf stream, which entered the polar basin north of Nova Zembla, and from the current northward through Bering strait. A third addition came from America, and especially from the Siberian rivers that ran

It

into the polar sea. seemed quite natural that these sources should converge, and to some extent unite to form the Greenland current. The main body of this current must, according to Dr. Nansen, be somewhere in the neighborhood of the New Siberian islands. Here also was the mouth of the Lena river, which carried a considerable body of comparatively warm water northward into the polar sea. From this region the current must naturally run in a northerly direction by the shortest route to the outlet between Spitzbergen and Greenland, and this must be to the north of Franz-Josef Land and across or near the north pole.

The leading incidents of the journey of Dr. Nansen and his companions are briefly

outlined as follows, chiefly in the words of the explorer himself:

"The Fram left Jugor strait, August 4, 1893. We had to force our way through much ice along the Siberian coast. We discovered an island in the Kara sea and a great number of islands along the coast to Cape Cheljuskin. In several places we found evidences of a glacial epoch, during which northern Siberia must have been covered by inland ice to a great extent. On September 15 we were off the mouth of the Olenek river, but we thought it was too late to go in there to fetch our dogs (Nansen had arranged to call there for that purpose, and his non-appearance caused much anxiety) as we would not risk losing a year. We passed the New Siberian islands September 22. We made fast to a floe in latitude 78° 50' north, and in longitude 133° 37' east (about 300 miles from where the Jeannette sank,

MAP SHOWING NANSEN'S ROUTE AND OTHER RESULTS OF ARCTIC EXLORATION.

NOTE.-The above map was specially drawn for CURRENT HISTORY, and is based on charts furnished by the Hydrographic Office of the Bureau of Navigation, Department of the Navy, Washington, D. C., corrected up to October 16, 1896. All the important points are indicated, which are mentioned in the accompanying description of the voyage of Dr. Nansen and his ship the Fram; so that the reader is enabled not only to trace the results of preceding expeditions, but to follow from point to point the wonderful story of this latest and greatest achievement. The projected route of the Fram is indicated by a line of alternate dots and dashes; its actual route after the drift began, by a heavy dark line; and Nansen's route on foot, by a small dotted line. The highest latitude reached is shown by the circle drawn in the vicinity of the pole. At 56° 14' north, Nansen concluded to abandon the effort to reach the pole; but he and his companion went on skis twelve miles still further north.