4© TRAVELS IN 
sometimes their hoofs become so tender by travelling upon 
the hot sand and gravel, that they are obliged to be left on 
the desert ; and they generally arrive at the town in so maimed 
and miserable a condition, as to be very unfit for what they 
are intended. Could the farmers near the Cape be once 
prevailed upon to sow turnips, which may be produced here 
equally good as in Europe, to plant potatoes, and cultivate 
the artificial grasses, the quality of the beef and mutton might 
be very materially improved. A few inhabitants who stall- 
feed their cattle, have their tables supplied with beef little, if 
at all, inferior to what is sold in Leadenhall market ; but the 
adoption of such a system would require more labor and ac- 
tivity, and more attention, than the body and mind of a Dutch 
farmer seem capable of supplying : his avarice, however great, 
is overcome by the habits of indolence in which he has been 
educated. 
On the fifteenth, from the exhausted state of our oxen, three 
of which we had been obliged to leave behind, we made only 
a short stage of ten or twelve miles to the riet fonteyn, or the 
reed spring, which took its rise out of a high cone-shaped hill, 
with a flat top, and ran in a feebk s-xeam to the southward. 
The banks were skirted by a thicket of the doom boom, or 
thorn-tree, a species of 7nimosa, which the two Swedish tra- 
Tellers, who have published their researches in Southern Africa, 
have erroneously called the nilotica, or that which produces 
the gum Arabic. The pods of the latter are very long, and 
inoniliform, or divided like a string of beads ; whereas the 
karroo mimosa has short sickle-shaped pods. Armed from 
the summit down to the ground with enornKjus double thorns, 
