CARL BERNS, a Swedish philanthropist, was born at Stockholm in 1746. He rose to eminence as an engineer; and was employed by the Swedish government in several important public works and offices. Meanwhile he found leisure at various intervals to visit different parts of Europe; and in 1787 he undertook a journey into the interior of Africa. Along with the naturalists Sparrman and Arrhenius, he sailed in a French vessel to Senegal, but being unable either from this place or from Sierra Leone to penetrate into the interior, he proceeded to England about the end of 1788. As the question of the slave-trade was then agitating the country, the travellers, who had just come from Africa, were called on to give evidence before the privy council and a committee of the lower house, and Wadstroem being thus led to study the subject, became a strong supporter of the abolitionists. His pamphlet entitled Observations on the Slave Trade, contained the first suggestion of colonisation as a means of checking slavery; and he afterwards pursued the subject in a larger work, an Essay on Colonisation, particularly applied to the West Coast of Africa. The devastation of Sierra Leone by the French in 1794, led Wadstroem to proceed to Paris, in hopes of inducing the French government to recognise the African settlements as neutral territory. In this he was never successful, but he remained at Paris till his death in 1799.