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much grass-burning-. The I-)antu races ccmiing from the Xorth- 

 East, on the other hand, were agricuhurists, and speedily found 

 that old forest land yielded the richest crops, and that veld 

 burned in winter yielded green spring grass. They began the 

 systematic destruction of the forests and the ruination of the 

 grass velds l)y the burning of the grass. The early Dutch and 

 luiglish settlers followed both ])ractices. The grass throughout 

 South .\frica was. and is. ruthlessly burned, the forests were 

 worked, cut out. and ruined. Thousands of acres of what was 

 originally forest is now l)are veld ; great areas of what arc 

 called forests are today merely scrub with scarcely a timber tree 

 left ; and. finally, the areas which are still true forest have 

 almost invariably been so worked that they are drained in all 

 directions by slip-paths ; they are rapidly drying, and as a restilt 

 the old timber trees are dying from the top down, and there is 

 little or no regrowth. These forests have been called retro- 

 gressive : to a certain extent they are. ])ut it must unfortunately 

 be owned that the retrogression is a result of the ])art man has 

 played in the moulding of the destinies of these forests, and is 

 not due, as some people w'ould say, to any natural phenomenon. 

 The result has been a slow, perhaps scarcely ])erceptible but 

 nevertheless insistent, change in the character of the precipi- 

 tated moisture. 



The burning of the grass was the first of the tw(^ great 

 catises of desiccation to take place. The effect of this burning 

 was the gradual killing out of the more tender " sweet " grasses. 

 This, of course, meant that instead of the grass offering a con- 

 tinued impediment to the run-oft' of mc^isture, a way was left 

 between the tufts of grass for the precipitated moisture to rush 

 downhill. This resulted in less .soakage taking place, and the 

 temperature of the ground rising. Successive fires destroyed 

 more and more of the grass ; what had been at first a mere 

 passage for water to run to waste gradtially deepened into a 

 donga ; sheep and native paths and disused roads resulted in 

 further donga formation, and year by year the soakage 

 became less, and the percentage of the precipitated moisture 

 running to waste more. Bereft of the cooling effect of the 

 moisture which had previously soaked in, and with its surface 

 exposed, through the killing oft' of the grass, to the full rays 

 of the sun. the temperature of the grass-lands rose, with the 

 eft'ect that vapour-laden breezes were repelled instead of at- 

 tracted. With the cutting and working of the forests, the same 

 result was achieved. Every slip-])atli for timber acted as a 

 drain, carrying aw^ay moisture which should have remained in 

 the spongy humus of the forest floor. Every tree felled let in 

 light, which helped to decompose the humus. Our indigenous 

 forest trees require the soil to constantly have a certain amount 

 of moisture, but with these artificial conditions the re(|uisite 

 amount soon became absent, and the trees began to die or to 

 become what is commonly called stompkop — that is. to have the 



