Orphans Are Never Allowed To Remain Long Destitute;
And Instances Are Frequent In Which A Tender-Hearted Farmer Has Adopted
A Fatherless Child, And When It Came Of Age Portioned It As His Own.
Two centuries of the South African climate have not had much effect
upon the physical condition of the Boers.
They are a shade darker,
or rather ruddier, than Europeans, and are never cadaverous-looking,
as descendants of Europeans are said to be elsewhere.
There is a tendency to the development of steatopyga,
so characteristic of Arabs and other African tribes; and it is probable
that the interior Boers in another century will become in color
what the learned imagine our progenitors, Adam and Eve, to have been.
The parts of the colony through which we passed were of sterile aspect;
and, as the present winter had been preceded by a severe drought,
many farmers had lost two thirds of their stock. The landscape
was uninviting; the hills, destitute of trees, were of a dark brown color,
and the scanty vegetation on the plains made me feel that they deserved
the name of Desert more than the Kalahari. When first taken possession of,
these parts are said to have been covered with a coating of grass,
but that has disappeared with the antelopes which fed upon it,
and a crop of mesembryanthemums and crassulas occupies its place.
It is curious to observe how, in nature, organizations the most dissimilar
are mutually dependent on each other for their perpetuation.
Here the original grasses were dependent for dissemination
on the grass-feeding animals, which scattered the seeds.
When, by the death of the antelopes, no fresh sowing was made,
the African droughts proved too much for this form of vegetation.
But even this contingency was foreseen by the Omniscient One;
for, as we may now observe in the Kalahari Desert, another family of plants,
the mesembryanthemums, stood ready to neutralize the aridity
which must otherwise have followed. This family of plants
possesses seed-vessels which remain firmly shut on their contents
while the soil is hot and dry, and thus preserve the vegetative power intact
during the highest heat of the torrid sun; but when rain falls,
the seed-vessel opens and sheds its contents just when there is
the greatest probability of their vegetating. In other plants
heat and drought cause the seed-vessels to burst and shed their charge.
One of this family is edible (`Mesembryanthemum edule'); another possesses
a tuberous root, which may be eaten raw; and all are furnished with thick,
fleshy leaves, having pores capable of imbibing and retaining moisture
from a very dry atmosphere and soil, so that, if a leaf is broken
during a period of the greatest drought, it shows abundant circulating sap.
The plants of this family are found much farther north,
but the great abundance of the grasses prevents them from making any show.
There, however, they stand ready to fill up any gap which may occur
in the present prevailing vegetation; and should the grasses disappear,
animal life would not necessarily be destroyed, because a reserve supply,
equivalent to a fresh act of creative power, has been provided.
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