ABSTRACT
Notwithstanding the progress of discovery on the coasts and borders of that base continent [i.e. Africa] the map of its interior is still but a wide extended blank, on which the geographer, on the authority of Leo Africanus and of the Xeriff of Edrissi the Nubian author, has traced with hesitating hand a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations…. Sensible of this stigma, and desirous of rescuing the age from a charge of ignorance, which, on other respects, belongs so little to its character, a few individuals, strongly impressed with a conviction of the practicability and utility of thus enlarging the fund of human knowledge, have formed the plan of an Association for Promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa.3
