43° 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Fig. 8. Euphorbia tetragona, near Cathcaet, South Africa. 



The young man must work hard to get his first wife, for wives cost 

 about $500 apiece. Then, with a helpmeet, it is easier to get the 

 second wife, and a third wife comes still more easily. There is no 

 reason why a man with three wives should work any more, and so life 

 becomes easy for him. As he gets older, he has daughters to sell, and 

 can buy more wives. The average well-to-do Zulu has from half a 

 dozen to a score of wives and it is not unusual for a chief to have several 

 hundred. A man with only one wife has about the same standing as 

 a slaveholder with only one slave had in the south before the Civil War, 

 and, consequently, the earlier wives are eager to work hard to elevate the 

 standing of the family. The whole family lives together in a collection 

 of huts, called a krall (Fig. 7), each wife having a hut of her own, and 

 the polygamous husband boarding around. You can tell the number 

 of wives in a family by counting the houses in a krall. 



At Cedara, a government experiment station about eighty miles 

 northwest of Durban, the extensive work in forestation is interesting 

 from both the botanical and economic standpoints. This work is under 

 the direction of Mr. Stayner, who has received all the training Kew 

 affords. Many believe the extensive grass velts of South Africa were 

 originally covered by forests, and that the native, with his childish 

 desire to see things burn, had destroyed the forests before white people 



