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23 scientific methods of treating ores, of salt-works and the recovery of salt from the earth and from the waters, and also of languages made intelligent by an alphabet. All these were no doubt derived through Egypt from Arabia, but they survive, are being fostered and exploited by the British Empire under her newly-acquired protectorate, Nigeria. On the British has fallen, even here, the mantle of all previous nations, and what has lain dormant and unproductive for centuries is now being developed by our Empire. Population is being increased owing to the suppression of the slave trade, and what was once called the Granary of Rome may in time to come be called the Granary of Britain. From our Eastern African port, Mombasa, by the Uganda railway, to the sources of the Nile, the country is being opened up to the cultivation of cotton and other tropical products; and as raw cotton is one of Great Britain's greatest importations for manufacturing purposes, for which she is largely dependent upon America, it would be the irony of fate if in the future America should buy her cotton from Africa, where she formerly seized her slaves for the cultivation of the cotton-fields of her Southern States. Such is one result of the domination by war, the subsequent extension of commerce, and the consequent rise of civilization in Africa, hitherto known as the Dark Continent, under the British Flag.

In this the first decade of the twentieth century we have before us, as it were, the concentration of all the previous knowledge of bygone ages, and the vast and searching investigations of science all combine to make the struggle for existence most keen and exhausting. In the daily avocations of the world, whether in commerce, in science, in literature, or in surgery, the demand is exacting, and the new discoveries in all of these branches call forth on all sides fresh incentives and caterers for the supply. The problem in all classes or professions is now how to adjust the supply, already over-abundant, to the demand. The professions are over-crowded, and, though the prizes may be great and few, the blanks are many and the list of failures