58 ANIMALS OF THE DESERT. 



phant, the most sagacious, flees the sound of flre-arms 

 first; the gnu and ostrich, the most wary and the most 

 stupid, last. The first emigrants found the Hottentots in 

 possession of prodigious herds of fine cattle, but no horses, 

 asses, or camels. The original cattle, which may still be 

 seen in some parts of the frontier, must have been brought 

 south from the north-northeast, for from this point the 

 natives universally ascribe their original migration. They 

 brought cattle, sheep, goats, and dogs : why not the horse, 

 the delight of savage hordes ? Horses thrive well in the 

 Cape Colony when imported. Naturalists point out cer- 

 tain mountain-ranges as limiting the habitat of certain 

 classes of animals ; but there is no Cordillera in Africa to 

 answer that purpose, there being no visible barrier between 

 the northeastern Arabs and the Hottentot tribes to prevent 

 the different hordes, as they felt their way southward, 

 from, indulging their taste for the possession ot this noble 

 animal. 



I am here led to notice an invisible barrier, more insur- 

 mountable than mountain-ranges, but which is not opposed 

 to the southern progress of cattle, goats, and sheep. The 

 tsetse would prove a barrier only until its well-defined 

 habitat was known; but the disease passing under the 

 term of horse-sickness {peripneumonia) exists in such viru- 

 lence over nearly seven degrees of latitude that no precau- 

 tion would be sufficient to save these animals. The horse 

 is so liable to this disease, that only by great care in stabling 

 can he be kept anywhere between 20° and 27° S. during 

 the time between December and April. The winter, begin- 

 ning in the latter month, is the only period in which Eng- 

 lishmen can hunt on horseback, and they are in danger of 

 losing all their studs some months before December. To 

 this disease the horse is especially exposed, and it is almost 

 always fatal. One attack, however, seems to secure im- 

 munity from a second. Cattle, too, are subject to it, but 

 only at intervals of a few, sometimes many, years; but it 

 never makes a clean sweep of the whole cattle of a village, 



