"Traveling from day to day among barbarians," he says in his Journal,
"exerts a most benumbing effect on the religious feelings of the soul."
Among the subjects that occupied a large share of his thoughts in these
long and laborious journeys, two appear to have been especially
prominent: first, the configuration of the country; and second, the best
way of conducting missions, and bringing the people of Africa to Christ.
The configuration of intertropical South Africa had long been with him a
subject of earnest study, and now he had come clearly to the conclusion
that the middle part was a table-land, depressed, however, in the
centre, and flanked by longitudinal ridges on the east and west; that
originally the depressed centre had contained a vast accumulation of
water, which had found ways of escape through fissures in the encircling
fringe of mountains, the result of volcanic action or of earthquakes.
The Victoria Falls presented the most remarkable of these fissures, and
thus served to verify and complete his theory.
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