90 AXIMAI£ OF THE DESERT. 



elephant, the most sagacious, flees the sound of firearms 

 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-north-east, 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 

 certain 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 north-eastern Arabs and the Hottentot tribes to pre- 

 vent the different hordes, as they felt their way south- 

 wards, from indulging their taste for the possession of 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 virulence 

 over nearly seven degrees of latitude, that no precaution 

 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, beginning 

 in the latter month, 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 especially 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. 



