The Slow Pace At Which We Wound Our Way Through The Colony
Made Almost Any Subject Interesting.
The attention is attracted
to the names of different places, because they indicate
the former existence of buffaloes, elands,
And elephants,
which are now to be found only hundreds of miles beyond.
A few blesbucks (`Antilope pygarga'), gnus, bluebucks (`A. cerulea'),
steinbucks, and the ostrich (`Struthio camelus'), continue, like the Bushmen,
to maintain a precarious existence when all the rest are gone.
The elephant, the most sagacious, flees the sound of fire-arms first;
the gnu and ostrich, the most wary and the most stupid, last.
The first emigrants found the Hottentots in possession of
prodigious herds of fine cattle, but no horses, asses, or camels.
The original cattle, which may still be seen in some parts of the frontier,
must have been brought south from the north-northeast, for from this point
the natives universally ascribe their original migration.
They brought cattle, sheep, goats, and dogs; why not the horse,
the delight of savage hordes? Horses thrive well in the Cape Colony
when imported. Naturalists point out certain mountain ranges
as limiting the habitat of certain classes of animals;
but there is no Cordillera in Africa to answer that purpose, there being
no visible barrier between the northeastern Arabs and the Hottentot tribes
to prevent the different hordes, as they felt their way southward,
from indulging their taste for the possession of this noble animal.
I am here led to notice an invisible barrier, more insurmountable
than mountain ranges, but which is not opposed to the southern progress
of cattle, goats, and sheep. The tsetse would prove a barrier
only until its well-defined habitat was known, but the disease
passing under the term of horse-sickness (peripneumonia) exists
in such virulence over nearly seven degrees of latitude that no precaution
would be sufficient to save these animals. The horse is so liable
to this disease, that only by great care in stabling can he be kept any where
between 20 Deg. and 27 Deg. S. during the time between December and April.
The winter, beginning in the latter month, is the only period
in which Englishmen can hunt on horseback, and they are in danger
of losing all their studs some months before December. To this disease
the horse is especially exposed, and it is almost always fatal.
One attack, however, seems to secure immunity from a second. Cattle, too,
are subject to it, but only at intervals of a few, sometimes many years;
but it never makes a clean sweep of the whole cattle of a village,
as it would do of a troop of fifty horses. This barrier, then,
seems to explain the absence of the horse among the Hottentots,
though it is not opposed to the southern migration of cattle,
sheep, and goats.
When the flesh of animals that have died of this disease is eaten,
it causes a malignant carbuncle, which, when it appears over
any important organ, proves rapidly fatal.
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