TO PRETORIA. . 5 



not calmed by the reflection that in the early days of 

 discovery it took the Portuguese a hundred years with 

 innumerable expeditions to double the same. Cape 

 Town, with its thriving business community and its 

 good shops, reminds one of a flourishing seaside town 

 in England. The fishing- quarters are inhabited chiefly 

 by Malays*, who seem, from long residence, to have 

 quite lost the purity of their mother tongue, and the Malay 

 women, in their best attire, affect a European costume, 

 in which an enormous and hideous bloomer-skirt is the 

 strongest point, a strange and unpleasant contrast to the 

 graceful sarong I remembered in the Malay Peninsula. 

 The South -African Museum, presided over by my old 

 friend Roland Trimen, leaves nothing to be desired but 

 greater space and more available funds for the acqui- 

 sition of fresh specimens. One can form no adequate 

 conception of the South- African fauna from the present 

 compulsory crowded contents of this building. The 

 arrangement of a museum should be the reflection of a 

 man's grasp of Zoology, but a curator has no oppor- 

 tunity of displaying the same if sufficient space is not 

 at his disposal. A local museum should perhaps follow 

 the ideal of a man's knowledge, to know a little about 

 everything, and everything about something ; so it might 

 be somewhat weak in several groups, but very strong 

 and exhaustive in one particular branch of Natural 

 History. This is the case here, for Mr. Trimen is a 

 renowned lepidopterist, and the collection of butterflies 

 is perhaps more complete and better worked out than 

 can be found in any other of our colonial museums. 

 One of its greatest treasures is the head of a " White 

 Rhinoceros " (Rhinoceros simus). This now practically 

 extinct mammal, which has been shot by living sports- 

 men, is unrepresented in any zoological menagerie, and 

 its perfect skin or skeleton is unknown in any museum, 

 thus affording a good illustration in the present day of 



* The large body of Malay Mussulmans at the Cape have of late years 

 come under the patronage of the Sultan. A school has also been founded at 

 Kimberley by the Sultan, which, after him, has been earned Hamidieh 

 ('Athenwum/ Oct. 17, 1891). 



