Author Description

Excerpt from Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: From the Journal of an Expedition Undertaken Under the Auspices of H. B. M. 'S Government, in the Years 1849-1855 The extraordinary success of the cheap and popular edition of Dr. Livingston's Travels in South Africa, has suggested to the publisher the propriety of issuing a similar edition of Dr. Earths Travels in North Central Africa, as a suitable companion and supplement to the former work. The English edition of Dr. Barth's Travels fills five octavo volumes, and the cost is between twenty-five and thirty dollars. The authors reasons for issuing the work in this voluminous and expensive form are readily seen. His favorite object is the advancement of discovery in Africa; and wishing to render his work as useful as possible to all future travellers in the regions which he visited, he appears to have published the greater part of his entire journal for a period of more than five years. In it are noticed the incidents of travel from day to day and from week to week, with rather minute descriptions of monuments, mountains, rivers, deserts, rocks, and trees seen on the route, as well as the important transactions of the expedition, and the accounts of great cities and nations, their manners, customs, costumes, religion, government, finances, commerce, laws, & c. Now, for the travellers who are to succeed Dr. Earth, and for scientific inquirers, this minute journal is exactly what is wanted; and such persons can well afford to pay for it. But with the general reading public it is quite the reverse. The general reader desires to know where Dr. Earth went, what new discoveries he made, what he saw, what dangers, difficulties, perils, and adventures he went through, and what, on the whole, was accomplished by the expedition; but, on the other hand, ordinary readers are not willing for this purpose to pay twenty-five or thirty dollars and wade through five octavo volumes of journal and