Mountain, wonderfully impressive for its height of only thirty-five 

 hundred feet, especially when the "tablecloth" of cloud caps the moun- 

 tain and pours down over its side like a cataract. I was charmed to see, 

 for the first time, penguins swimming and diving about the ship; I had 

 seen them in a glass tank at the London Zoo, but never before in their 

 wild state. There is a great penguin rookery on Robben Island, not far 

 from Cape Town, where the birds are carefully protected. 



The official party was distributed among the hospitable families 

 which were to entertain its members. These families were all in the 

 suburbs, for "everybody as is anybody" has a suburban home and uses 

 the excellent train service in going to and from his office. The city is 

 very English in appearance and has almost completely lost its original 

 Dutch character, but the English and people of British descent leave the 

 town to business and government and to the East Indian, Boer and 

 native elements of the population. There is a fine street in Cape Town, 

 called the Avenue, which is lined with large oak trees and these, I was 

 interested to see, were putting out new leaves, though it was mid- 

 winter. The winter is like that of Buenos Aires, almost always com- 

 fortable out of doors, desperately cold in the unheated houses. There was 

 one snowstorm, such as I never saw in Argentina, but the snow melted 

 as fast as it fell. The Botanical Society had arranged, for our benefit, an 

 exhibition of the wild plants which were in bloom at the time of our 

 visit and the display of brilliant flowers was quite wonderful. 



Together with Professor A. P. Coleman, of Toronto, I was the guest, 

 in the suburb of Maitland, of Dr. Hutcheon, Chief Veterinarian of Cape 

 Colony. Dr. Hutcheon was not only excessively kind and hospitable to 

 us, but also an uncommonly interesting talker. He told me much con- 

 cerning the stock diseases which had swept away the flocks and herds of 

 both colonials and natives. During the Boer War, the British Army 

 Transport had brought together draught cattle from all over Africa and 

 had thus assembled a choice assortment of bovine diseases — Texas fever, 

 rinderpest, foot-and-mouth disease, red-water fever, etc. Very often the 

 exhausted ox-teams were turned loose, to shift for themselves and infect 

 the local herds. Even the wild game was infected and so decimated that 

 I saw almost no wild animals in a country that once was famous for its 

 herds of antelope, zebra and other game. This has always seemed to me 

 to suggest one factor in the extinction of mammals in the past, the onset, 

 namely, of new infectious diseases. 



Newly imported horses were liable to an unclassified disease, which 

 was simply called "horse sickness," and from which most of them died. 



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