494 REPLACEMENT OF THE ANCIExXT E. AFRICAN FOREST, 



and the production o.f evidence from elsewhere than in anv way 

 to attempt to doumatize. 



2. The Two Types of Wooding referred to. 



From where I write, 700 feet above the nearer flats, and 

 4,000 a'bove sea-level, on the hill that is crowned b}' Chirinda, I 

 can see an immense tract of country. It includes low veld, 

 stretching away to sea-level and looking- like the sea, foot-hills, 

 plateau, and high mountains, the latter with peaks of nearly 9,000 

 feet. And practically the whole of this great stretch of country, 

 physically and geologically most varied, is to-day under grass, 

 and to the greater part of it can be accurately applied Welwitsch's 

 term of " wooded pasture." The wooding varies from widely- 

 scattered shrubs and small trees and groves to a uniform cover- 

 ing df close-standing trees that is nevertheless mere wooded pas- 

 ture, not true forest. The species arc extraordinarily varied, 

 but nearly pure wooding sometimes occiu-s in the groves oi 

 Uapaca Kirkiana and Bracliystegia on the drier slopes of the 

 mesophytic areas, of Acacia near natal it ia on the dolerite, and of 

 Copaifera inopane in areas of smaller rainfall. Grass hres, lit 

 by natives wishful to cultivate, or hunting buck and rats — also 

 nowadays by whites — sweep over it annually. 



The type of vegetation is one which, with \ariations, is 

 common throu.tih much of Africa south and north-east of Tan- 

 ganyika. 



One feature in the view remains unmentioned. In rare, 

 isolated, little patches on the flats, or tilling kloofs, or, more fre- 

 quently, crowning hills and looking like the " Rings " on the 

 Sussex downs, are small, dark " forests of gigantic timber,"' a- 

 Livingstone called them in Angola. The nearest of them, a 

 hundred yards away, completes the panoramic view I have de- 

 scribed, carrying it round from the south-east to the west again, 

 and, except (for its larger size, is sufficiently typical of them all. 

 Its suddenness— its non-blending with the surroimding grass veld 

 — is the feature that most strikes an observer outside. It is like 

 a tall plantation. On entering it, one is struck with its loftiness, 

 its density, and its step-like formation, described already in my 

 I)aper on the Melsetter trees and shrubs. No contrast could be 

 stronger than that between this type of forest and the woodinu- 

 of the grass veld, whether we have regard to their outward ap- 

 pearance or to more fundamental characteristics. The trees of 

 the forest are intolerant of Are, the pasture trees are especially 

 adapted to withstand it. The members of the one formation 

 never enter into competition with those of the other — where grass- 

 burning is the practice — yet the soil and moisture conditions 

 inside and outside the forest are exactly the same, excepting in sc> 

 far as they are modified by the jjresence of the forest itself. 



Sub-divisible, as the eff'ect of altitude, into " mountain "' and 

 lowland types, the first with an admixture ai Gymnosperms, the 

 second without them but loftier, and varied further with latitude. 

 Chirinda-like forest is found in patches throughout East Africa 



