within tile pale of Islam. The sovereigns of Sokoto extended their power over Adamawa, and the father of the present sultan, iY[allem Adama, founded a new Mohammedan kingdom on the ruins of several pagan States, of which the most important was Kokomi. When the work of destruction was accomplished, the conquerors began to colonise and reconstruct ; after having ravaged immense stretches of country they attempted to cultivate it afresh ; and in order to establish political unity, destroyed a great number of natives, so that the scattered States, once joined under their seeptre, became available for extensive commercial relations. Thus, the explorer Joseph Thomson writes in the Contem- porary .Review that in comparing the degraded populations of the Coast of Guinea and the banks of the Lower Niger with those of the Central Sudan, what he saw there gave him a very different impression from what he had expected to see. Although he was in the heart of Africa, in the midst of veritable Negroes, they were very different from those he had met in his travels. He found there large and well-built towns, well-clothed people, behaving with self-possessed dignity; and everywhere signs of an in- dustrious community, highly advanced in the path of civilisation, carry- ing on different trades; the various metals were worked, stuffs were spun and dyed, and the markets were thronged with people. Savage tribes had been transformed into semi-civilised nations l Fetichism, with its degrading superstitions, had disappeared before Islam, which had in- spired the Negroes with a new and vigorous life. Thomson adds that Islam reigns at the present day from the. Nile to the Atlantic, and from the Sahara as far as the sixth or even the fourth degree north of the Equator.
