102 HORSE-SICKNESS. Chap. V. 



latter mouth, is the only period in which Englishmen can hunt 

 on horseback, and they are in danger of losing all their studs 

 some months before December. To this disease the horse is espe- 

 cially exposed, and it is almost always fatal. One attack, however, 

 seems to secure immunity 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, as 

 it would do of a troop of fifty horses. This barrier, then, seems to 

 explain the absence of the horse among the Hottentots, though it is 

 not opposed to the southern migration of cattle, sheep, and goats. 



When the flesh of animals that have died of this disease is 

 eaten, it causes a malignant carbuncle ; which, when it appears 

 over any important organ, proves rapidly fatal. It is more 

 especially dangerous over the pit of the stomach. The effects of 

 the poison have been experienced by missionaries who had eaten 

 properly cooked food, the flesh of sheep really but not visibly 

 affected by the disease. The virus in the flesh of the animal is de- 

 stroyed neither by boiling nor roasting. This fact, of which we have 

 had innumerable examples, shows the superiority of experiments 

 on a large scale to those of acute and able physiologists and 

 chemists in the laboratory, for a well-known physician of Paris, 

 after careful investigation, considered that the virus in such cases 

 was completely neutralized by boiling. 



Tliis disease attacks wild animals too. During our residence 

 at Chonuane great numbers of tolos, or koodoos, were attracted 

 to the gardens of the Bakwains, abandoned at the usual period 

 of harvest because there was no prospect of the corn (Holcus 

 sorghum) bearing that year. The koodoo is remarkably fond of 

 the green stalks of tliis kind of millet. Free feeding produced 

 that state of fatness favourable for the development of the disease, 

 and no fewer than twenty-five died on the hill opposite our house. 

 Great numbers of gnus and zebras perished from the same cause, 

 but the mortality produced no sensible diminution in the numbers 

 of the game, any more than the deaths of many of the Bakwains 

 who persisted, in spite of every remonstrance, in eating the dead 

 meat, caused any sensible decrease in the strength of the tribe. 



The farms of the Boers consist generally of a small patch of 

 cultivated land in the midst of some miles of pasturage. They 

 are thus less an agricultural than a pastoral people. Each farm 



