Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/390

356 published in her Life of Sir Richard. But the following letter from Sir Roderick Murchison, called forth by her letter to The Times, and her reply thereto, have not been published:

"16,, November 14, 1869.

"My dear Mrs. Burton,

"I regret that you did not call on me as you proposed, instead of making your complaint in The Times.

"No change in the wording of the address could have been made when you appealed to me; for the printed article was in the hands of several reporters.

"Nor can I, in looking at the address (as now before me), see why you should be offended at my speaking of 'the great Lake Tanganyika, first visited by Burton and Speke.'

"My little opening address was not a history of all African discoveries; and if you will only refer to the twenty-ninth volume of The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (1859), you will see how, in presenting the medal to your husband as the chief of the East African Expedition, I strove to do him all justice for his successful and bold explorations. But I was under the necessity of coupling Speke with Burton as joint discoverers of the Lake Tanganyika inasmuch as they both worked together until prostrated by illness; and whilst your husband was blind or almost so, Speke made all the astronomical observations which fixed the real position of places near the lake.

"Thus your husband, in his reply to me after