bitter, sour, and saline plants, than which the arid soil of an African desert produces nothing better, constitute oft times their only food for weeks together; and to the use of these may probably be owing the offensive breath that the ox of the colony is generally observed to have. In Europe, the sweetness of the breath of horned cattle is almost proverbial. In Africa it is remarked to be altogether as nauseous. The bad quality of the water, which in the desert plains is never met with pure, but impregnated with saline or earthy matter, may also contribute in producing this effect. The speed of an ox in the waggon, where the country is tolerably level, and the surface hard, is full three miles an hour, at which rate he will continue for ten or twelve hours without halting.

The first day of July was fixed upon for our departure from the Cape; and the preceding month was employed in making the necessary preparations, fitting up three waggons, and in procuring draught oxen, which at this season of the year, after the long drought, were scarce and extremely lean. Bastaards for drivers, and Hottentots to lead the foremost pair in the team, and to take care of the relays, were very difficult to be procured, but indispensably necessary. Every thing, however, was in readiness on the day fixed, though it was night before the waggons left the town; and the oxen were so miserably bad, that before they had proceeded three miles, two of them dropped in the yokes, and were obliged to be left behind. In seven hours they had only advanced about fifteen miles, to a place called Stickland, where Sir James Craig had caused stabling for seven troops of dragoons, and stonebuildings for the officers and men, to be erected, as a place of great importance in case of an attack from

a powerful enemy. This station is at the south point of a range of hills called the Tigerberg or Tiger Mountain, that terminates, on this side, the sandy isthmus. At the feet of the hills, and in the vallies formed by them, are several pleasant farms, with gardens well stored with vegetables for the table, fruiteries, vineyards, and extensive corn lands. As none of the latter are inclosed, there is a general appearance of nakedness in the country, which, if planted with forest trees, as the oak and the larch, and divided by fences, would become sufficiently beautiful, as nature in drawing the outline has performed her part. The sandy flat, of which the Tigerberg forms the boundary, is applied to no use but that of furnishing a part of the supply of fuel for the town, and for the country people and butchers occasionally to turn their cattle upon. It is a prevailing opinion at the Cape, that this isthmus, which now separates the two principal bays, was once covered with the sea, making, at that time, the Cape promontory a complete island. The flatness and little elevation of the surface, the quantity of sand upon it, and the number of shells buried in the sand, have been urged as the grounds for such a conjecture. If, however, such has been the case, and the retreat of the sea progressive, it is an incalculable period of time since the two bays have been united. The surface is from 20 to 30 feet above the level of high-water mark; the sand upon it, except where it is drifted into ridges, is seldom three feet deep, and generally rests on sand-stone or hard gravel, bound together, and coloured yellow or brown with iron. The vegetable remains, washed by the rains into the hollows, form in places bogs or peat-moss, and the water in them is of a deep claret-colour, and sometimes black. I never met with any shells on any part of the isthmus; but

the presence of these is no argument of their having been brought there by the sea. Many thousand waggon-loads of shells may be met with in various places along the eastern coast, in situations that are several hundred feet above the level of the sea. They are generally found in the greatest quantities in sheltered caverns, a circumstance that might lead to the supposition of the original inhabitants of the country being a sort of Troglodytes, as indeed the savage Hottentots of the interior in some degree still are. The fact is, they are carried from the coast into these elevated situations by the myriads of sea-fowl that frequent the African shores. At Muscle-bay is a remarkable cavern containing an immense quantity of different kinds of shells peculiar to the coast; above the level of which it is not less than three hundred feet; and behind the Lion's Head, at the same height, are beds of shells, buried under vegetable earth and clay. The human mind can form no idea as to the measure of time required for the sea to have progressively retreated from such elevations.

The plain that stretches to the eastward from Tigerberg is less sandy, and better covered with shrubs and plants, than the isthmus, and has a few farms scattered thinly over it near rills of water, that have broken the surface into deep glens in their passage to the northward. On the more arid and naked parts, consisting of yellow clay and sand, are thrown up many thousands of those cellular masses of earth by a small insect of the ant tribe, to which naturalists have given the name of termes, different, however, from, and much less destructive than, that species, of which a curious description has been given by Mr.Smeathman in the Philosophical Transactions. The ant-hills in this part of Africa seldom exceed the height of three feet.

The plain to the eastward, at a dozen miles beyond Stickland, is terminated by two mountains, between which the road leads into a valley better cultivated and more thickly inhabited than any part between it and the Cape. Simonsberg, on the right, is among the highest of the mountains that are seen from the Cape. Its forked Parnassian summit is frequently, in winter, covered with snow, and in the south-east winds of summer is generally buried in the clouds. It also has its Helicon trickling down its sides, as yet a virgin spring untasted by the Muses. It held out more charms, it seems, for Plutus, than for Apollo. A man in the time of the governor, whose name the mountain perpetuates, intent on making his fortune by imposing on the credulity and ignorance of the Company's servants, melted down a quantity of Spanish dollars, and presented the mass to the governor as a specimen of silver from a rich mine that he had discovered in this mountain. Enraptured at the proof of so important a discovery, a resolution was passed by the governor in council, that a sum of money should be advanced to the man to enable him to prosecute his discovery, and work the mine, of which he was to have the sole direction; and in the mean time to convince the public of the rising wealth of the colony, the mass of silver was ordered to be manufactured into a chain, to which the keys of the Castle gates should be suspended. The chain was made, and still remains in the same service for which it was originally intended, as a memorial of the credulity of the governor and the

council.

The Paarlberg, on the left of the pass into the valley, is a hill of moderate height, and has taken its name from a chain of large round stones that pass over the summit, like the pearls of a necklace.

Of these, the two that are placed near the central and highest point of the range, are called par excellence, the pearl and the diamond: and a particular description of them has been thought worthy of a place in the Philosophical Transactions. From that paper, and Mr. Masson's description, it would appear that these two masses of stone rested upon their own bases, and were detached from the mountain; whereas they grow out, and form a part, of it. It has also been said, that their composition was totally different from the rocks that are found in the neighbouring mountains, which led a naturalist in Europe to observe, that these immense blocks of granite had probably been thown up by volcanic explosions, or by some cause of a similar nature. It has been observed in the preceding Chapter, that the sand stone strata of the Table Mountain rested upon a bed of primæval granite, and that an infinite number of large stones were scattered at the feet of the Mountains along the sea-coast, from the Lion's Head to the true Cape of Good Hope. All these are precisely of the same nature, and the same materials, as the pearl and the diamond; that is to say, they are aggregates of quartz and mica; the first in large irregular masses, and the latter in black lumps resembling shorl: they contain also cubic pieces of feltspar, and seem to be bound together by plates of a clayey iron stone. All the stones of this description appear to have been formed round a nucleus, as by the action of the air and weather they fall to pieces in large concentric lamina. The Pearl is accessible on the northern side, but is nearly perpendicular on all the rest. This sloping side is more than a thousand feet, and the perpendicular altitude about four hundred feet above the summit of the mountain, and the circumference of its base is a full mile. Near the top it is quadrisected by two clifts,