First Footsteps in East Africa #262442

If this is true, one of the greatest dangers to which civilisation has ever been exposed lies close before us now. The age of exploration is dead. Except for a few scarcely inhabited plateaus in Central Asia, and a few hummocks of indistinguish able ice around the poles, the general surface of the earth has now been accurately surveyed, its languages interpreted, its customs catalogued and compared. The final period of adventure, as we have under stood the word, has drawn to a Close; it can never be revived, and our children will have either to live rather tediously upon its records or to change their nature. In its last and greatest stage it continued through four centuries — say from the voyages of Columbus to the journeys of Stanley, and each century was celebrated by discoveries that fill us with an envy never now to be satisfied. The Americas, Asia, the Pacific, and Australia all come in their turn, bringing astonishment to mankind, and the joy of true adventure to their explorers. Last century gave us Africa as the last field of ex ploration, and with it the fitting men of the explorer breed. Mungo Park, Moffat, Livingstone, Grant, Speke, Samuel Baker, Cameron, Stanley — those are the names that come at once to every one's mind when Africa is mentioned. And among them is Richard Burton's.