1833,] FOOD OF LARGE QUADRUPEDS. 85 
any sure guide that they formerly were clothed with a luxuriant 
vegetation: I have no doubt that the sterile country a little 
southward, near the Rio Negro, with its scattered thorny trees, 
would support many and large quadrupeds. 
That large animals require a luxuriant vegetation, has been a 
general assumption which has passed from one work to another ; 
but I do not hesitate to say that it is completely false, and that 
it has vitiated the reasoning of geologists on some points of great 
interest in the ancient history of the world. The prejudice has 
probably been derived from India, and the Indian islands, where 
troops of elephants, noble forests, and impenetrable jungles, are 
associated together in every one’s mind. If, however, we refer 
to any work of travels through the southern parts of Africa, we 
shall find allusions in almost every page either to the desert cha- 
racter of the country, or to the numbers of large animals inha- 
biting it. The same thing is rendered evident by the many 
engravings which have been published of various parts of the 
interior. When the Beagle was at Cape Town, I made an 
excursion of some days’ length into the country, which at least 
was sufficient to render that which I had read more fully intel- 
ligible. 
Dr. Andrew Smith, who, at the head of his adventurous 
party, has lately succeeded in passing the Tropic of Capricorn, 
informs me that, taking into consideration the whole of the 
southern part of Africa, there can be no doubt of its being a 
sterile country. On the southern and south-eastern coasts there 
are some fine forests, bwt with these exceptions, the traveller may 
pass for days together through open plains, covered by a poor 
and scanty vegetation. It is difficult to convey any accurate 
idea of degrees of comparative fertility ; but it may be safely 
said that the amount of vegetation supported at any one time* 
by Great Britain, exceeds, perhaps even tenfold, the quantity on 
an equal area, in the interior parts of Southern Africa. The 
fact that bullock-waggons can travel in any direction, excepting 
near the coast, without more than occasionally half an hour’s 
delay in cutting down bushes, gives, perhaps, a more definite 
* I mean by this to exclude the total amount, which may have been suc- 
cessively produced and consumed during a given period, 
