HAMILTON SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION 83 



tremendous oxen. These have horns that are sometimes five 

 feet from tip to tip. A team may have a dozen or may have 

 tvi^enty oxen in it. It is a strenuous affair to drive a team 

 like that. The roads, as I said, are not made, they are found 

 — discovered, and are not always of the very best. 



Occasionally in South Africa the rivers do flow. I am 

 afraid I gave you a rather bad impression of the rivers of the 

 country from the one I showed before. It is not very 

 difficult driving on the bare Veldt, but these ravines make 

 tremendously hard travelling. The driver is generally a 

 Kaffir. What bad words he uses I do not know, but he 

 certainly has to use a large number of bad words. He has a 

 whip made of rhinoceros hide, a short one, and then another 

 like a fishing pole twenty or thirty feet long, and he can hit 

 the ears of his oxen without any difficulty from his perch on 

 the waggon. If that does not do the business sufficiently, 

 the small boy runs ahead and whips the leaders. The boy 

 that is running ahead is a sturdy, rosy cheeked lad, bare- 

 footed and usually bare-headed. They travel fifteen or 

 twenty miles a day. That is the way South Africa was 

 travelled in the olden times. That method of travel is still 

 common in South Africa. 



The Orange River is the largest river in South Africa. 

 This river and its tributary, the Vaal River, are the two 

 important rivers in that region, although not very deep. It 

 was after night, and we had the mule team with four mules. 

 They went rattling down the bank and into the water, 

 and I found that it was only actually up to a foot or so. 

 We have rivers that in their season may be flooded and may 

 carry a large volume of water, but during the dry part of the 

 year they carry comparatively little water. 



South Africa is the land of gold. We went there to see 

 geology and not mines, although we visited the mines. 

 Johannesburg is the most populous city in South Africa. 

 The buildings are of quite an American type. The American 

 influence has been quite strong in Johannesburg. The street 

 cars are the very weak side of Johannesburg, so that when 



