and certain Electrical Phenomena. 477 



as being " some ninety or more feet in height, formed of 

 seven huge boulders, the largest, that at the bottom, about 

 the size of a moderate cottage, and the smallest, that at the 

 top, some eight or ten feet in diameter. These boulders were 

 rounded like a cricket-ball — evidently through the action of 

 water, and yet the hand of Nature had contrived to balance 

 them, each one smaller than that beneath, the one upon the 

 other, and to keep them so. But this was not always the 

 case. For instance, a very similar mass that had risen on the 

 near side of the perfect pillar had fallen, all except the two 

 bottom stones, and the boulders that went to form it lay scat- 

 tered about like monstrous petrified cannon-balls." (Pages 

 43 & 44.) 



It is amazing to find that a writer who is dealing with real 

 historical events in a land so well known and so often described 

 as the Transvaal, should not have consulted some of the nu- 

 merous authorities on the subject before he ventured on such 

 a description as the above ; but what follows is still more 

 amazing. He is describing an African thunderstorm, pretty 

 much in the style of Burchell, Livingstone, and other authors 

 of repute, but the following is the writer's own: — 



u Suddenly one of the piled-up columns swayed to and fro 

 like a poplar in a breeze, and fell headlong with a crash that 

 almost mastered the awful crackling [?] of the thunder over- 

 head Down it came, beneath the strokes of the fiery 



sword, the brave old pillar that had lasted out so many cen- 

 turies, sending clouds of dust and fragments high up into the 

 blinding rain.''' 



Now it is perfectly true that South Africa is in many 

 respects a land of boulders, and is almost a counterpart of 

 Labrador. But there is no known natural process capable of 

 piling up these columns as described above ; nor are these 

 boulders waterworn, as the writer supposes. Geologists for- 

 merly regarded all boulders as being ice-borne, seeing that 

 they present many of the phenomena of the ice-borne boul- 

 ders of the Glacial period ; but those of the Transvaal differ 

 in being generally rounded, and of local origin, the apparent 

 sources of some of them being from a few to about fifty miles 

 distant. They rest on striated rocks, the crumbling surface of 

 which is moulded into round-backed hillocks. Mr. A. Ramsay 

 accounts for the presence and appearance of these boulders 

 by means of rock slides, and the action of sand driven over 

 them by wind and pressure. But the greater number of the 

 boulders in the Transvaal consist of fragments broken off from 

 the nearly horizontal strata. In many places the valleys are 

 floored with them, the blocks resting on each other in a con- 



