PREFACE. 



THE following pages record the impressions of a natu- 

 ralist, who, during a twelve months' business sojourn 

 in the Transvaal, deprived of the society of family and 

 friends, employed the whole of his leisure time in that 

 most delightful consolation zoological recreation. 



In my schoolboy days a journey through the Trans- 

 vaal would have almost attained the dignity of an ex- 

 ploration ; now Pretoria can be reached in three weeks' 

 time from London, and the once long wagon- trek from 

 the Cape is replaced by less than two days' train and a 

 little more than two days' coach service. But this 

 facility of transit, so valued by the business man and so 

 necessary to the material development of the country, 

 has deprived the sportsman of a hunting-ground and 

 curtailed the view of the naturalist. No longer do vast 

 herds of ruminants roam over these solitary plains, for 

 when commerce reached the land, and bid for the skins 

 of the buck and antelope, the Boer accepted the price 

 and slaughtered, if not actually exterminated, the finest 



