HAMILTON SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION 81 



Western prairie roads, just the tracks where the wheels have 

 gone, except to choose a good place. 



The next station we stopped at, we were to undertake a 

 long drive of forty or fifty miles, so carts came to meet us. 

 They are what they call Cape Carts, and are two-wheeled 

 vehicles. We had a dozen of these carts to take our party of 

 thirty or forty, and you see us negotiating there, each one 

 trying to get a good driver. They were pretty good drivers 

 on the whole. The houses are generally whitewashed, with 

 iron on the roof instead of shingles. Wood is a very 

 expensive thing in Africa, and you see steel and iron used 

 instead. 



On our drive from that town we came to some of the 

 newer settlements, and it was interesting to compare them 

 with our Canadian settlements. There you have the shanty 

 put up by a Boer farmer. The house itself is built after the 

 Indian style. In this case the roof was covered with earth, 

 very much like our Western farm-houses and the higher 

 regions of the West. The Boer farmer is a very ambitious 

 man, and while a farmer in this country would think himself 

 prosperous when he has a few hundred acres of land, the 

 Boer farmer needs 10,000 acres to live upon, because the soil 

 is barren. They have only a few inches of rainfall in the 

 year, and so the number of animals that can be fed is small, 

 and jj-ou cannot raise a crop anywhere unless you are able to 

 irrigate. The irrigation will be dependent upon the streams 

 that flow in the region. A great majority of his acres will 

 not be cultivated at all. It take.s the greater part of his land 

 to feed his herds and flocks. They seem able to feed on 

 almost anything or nothing. The vegetation is not of the 

 most attractive sort, and when a man has 10,000 sheep you 

 can see he needs a very large farm. 



This picture is a very interesting one to me, because this 

 was the first river that I had to do with in South Africa. 

 This line indicates the river. There is no water in this river 

 although it is an important river in South Africa. It has 

 everything but the water. . Here are the rocky shores, here 



