70 HORSE-SICKNESS. Chap. V. 



engrafting, a kind might be secured better adapted to the 

 country than the foreign vines at present cultivated. The 

 Americans find that some of their native vines yield wines 

 superior to those made from the very best plants imported 

 from France and Portugal. 



The slow pace at which we wound our way through the 

 (14) colony made almost any subject interesting. The attention is 

 attracted to the names of different places, because they indicate 

 the former existence of buffaloes, elands, and elephants, now 

 to be found only hundreds of miles beyond. A few blesbucks 

 (Antilope pyyaryd), gnus, bluebucks (A ceruled), steinbucks, and 

 the ostrich (Struthio camelus), continue, like the Bushmen, to 

 maintain a precarious existence. The elephant, the most sa- 

 gacious of animals, flees from the sound of firearms first ; the 

 gnu and ostrich, the most wary and the most stupid, vanish 

 last. The earliest emigrants found the Hottentots in posses- 

 sion of prodigious herds of fine cattle, but no horses, asses, or 

 camels. The natives universally believe that they travelled 

 hitherward from the north-north-east. They brought cattle, 

 sheep, goats, and dogs : why not the horse, the delight of 

 savage hordes ? 



The tsetse would not prove a barrier after its well-defined 

 habitat was knosvn, but the disease passing under the term of 

 horse-sickness (peripneumonia) exists in such virulence over 

 nearly seven degrees of latitude that it would be certainly 

 fatal. It is only by great care in stabling that the horse can 

 be kept anywhere between 20° and 27° S. from December to 

 April. One attack seems to secure immunity from a second. 

 Cattle are also subject to the disorder at intervals of a few, 

 or sometimes many, years; but it never makes a clean 

 sweep of a herd, as it would do of a troop of fifty horses. This 

 appears to be the reason why the Hottentots did not succeed 

 in bringing the horse to the south with their cattle, sh^ep, and 

 goats. 



The disease attacks wild animals. During our residence at 

 Chonuane numerous tolos, or koodoos, were attracted to the 

 gardens of the Bakwains, which were abandoned at the period 

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

 sorgit urn) bearing that year. The koodoo is fond of the green 

 stalks of this kind of millet, and free feeding produced the fat- 



