to the Company's practical monopoly of the trade and navigation of the Niger, which emanated more especially from Liverpool, led in 1898 to the formation under direct Government auspices of the West African Field Force in Nigeria, and in January, 1900, to the transfer of the administration to the Crown, the Company remaining without their charter as a trading concern only.
The southern part of the Company's territory was included in what had hitherto been called the Niger Coast Protectorate, under the new title of Southern Nigeria, while the great territory inland to the north of the seventh degree of latitude was called Northern Nigeria, and comprised an area of some 820,000 square miles, bounded on west and north by French possessions, and on the east by those of Germany. The country for which the British Government had thus made itself responsible mainly consisted of the 'Sokoto Empire' in the west, and the Bornu Empire in the east, both of them Mohammedan in religion, and boasting a civilization derived from the great Empire of Songhay, which had flourished in the sixteenth century, and was itself but the heir of the series of great Empires which had preceded it The story of these early Empires has recently been told in a volume named a 'Tropical Dependency,' and the little known chapter of history which is there unfolded is of quite extraordinary interest The Moors and the Berbers or Northern Africa from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries led the van of Western civilization, and gave to Spain the culture and art, the wealth and the learning, which made her the unrivalled mistress of the West, and has immortalized the names of her principal cities—Cordova, Seville, etc. Here the arts of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, and the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine attained an eminence which, clouded through the dark ages which followed the fall of the Moors and Berbers, was only revived and hardly excelled in quite modern times. This wonderful civilization was brought to
