IN SOUTH AFRICA. 553 
forming a peak of a singular character. If we may judge from 
their appearance, the mountains extending down the coast 
from Kamp's Bay towards the Cape of Good Hope, are of 
the same structure as the Table, for they all exhibit similar 
stratified escarpments, supported by less precipitous base- 
ments, which have quite the character of the granitic slopes 
above Kamp's Bay. The Muysenberg, however, and the 
mountains to the south of it, along the shore of False Bay, 
consist, so far as I could see, entirely of sandstone, the 
granite showing itself only along the edge of the sea. 
The lower part of the Devil’s mountain is covered with a 
thick bed of hard red clay, mixed in parts with a great deal 
of quartz and ironstone gravel and very similar in appear- 
ance to the soil of the Brazilian Campos. Beneath this may 
be seen, in some places, a hard, tough, imperfectly slaty, dark 
grey rock, with veins of quartz. The shore near the Green 
Point Lighthouse is bordered by rocks of this same sub- 
stance. 
For Botany, the season in which we arrived at the Cape 
was about the most unfavourable of the whole year. In my 
first walks in the neighbourhood of the town, I was disap- 
pointed as to the beauty of the native vegetation, and was 
more struck with its harsh, rigid, stunted character, than 
with any thing else; for nearly all the bulbous and herba- 
ceous plants had been burned up by the parching heat, and 
although the variety of shrubs was very great, but few of them 
were in flower. 'The impression which the botanical scenery of 
this place made on me was very different from that which 
had been produced by the luxuriant vegetation of Rio. "The 
uncultivated parts of Table Valley, and the lower slopes of 
the mountains, are rather thinly covered with heaths, and a 
variety of slender shrubs of a similar character, intermixed 
with prickly bushes resembling furze, thin wiry grasses, and 
abundance of hard tough rushes (Restiacee). In many places 
there are extensive groves of the Witteboom, or Silver-tree,* 
* Leucadendron argenteum, Br. 
