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immense, craggy, rocky, mountain ranges (Le Vaillant termed ono 
of them “ the backbone of the earth ”), and extensive desert plains, 
with a nice variation in the quality of their barrenness accordingly 
as they were of deep sand or ferruginous clay, mixed or unmixed 
with salt and gypsum. A colony, too, where the British element of 
population was still in utmost minority ; and where the surveying 
system hitherto in vogue in the back, or over-berg, country had 
been — to let any Dutch boer, wanting land, choose some possible 
central water-hole in Government or unoccupied ground, and 
then ride round it on horseback for three hours, or drive round it 
on an ox-waggon for three days, according to its degree of want 
of vegetation ; such interested boer undertaking to remember 
against all future comers what particular isolated bushes, or great 
rocks in the weary land, he had seen during such circumferential 
ride or drive, and had then and there chosen to be his baakens, or 
landmarks for ever afterwards. 
As population increased, such a system was of course most fruitful 
in land disputes, and the then Surveyor-General, Colonel Mitchell, 
formerly of the Portuguese Legion in the Peninsular War, found his 
attempts to introduce accurate surveying into town lots grievously 
swamped by having presently the legal business of certain Land- 
drosts, Heem-raden, and up-country Dutch Civil Commissioners, 
further thrust upon him, and his then sole assistant, Mr. Hertzog. He 
applied, therefore, in 1840, and obtained Mr. Bell's appointment as 
Second Assistant Surveyor-General ; when he (C. D. Bell) was 
immediately sent off on a long and solitary travel, occupying several 
months (quite a geographical exploration in itself, in his little ox- 
cart, and attended only by a Malay driver and a Hottentot leader of 
the oxen), to the north-western corner of the colony, to settle dis- 
puted claims there ; some of them on the cool Khamiesberg granite 
mountains 5000 and " 6000 feet high, others in the hot and arid 
plains below, or the sandstone ranges and steppe formations further 
eastward and northward, even as ' far as to the Orange River below 
its falls. And he settled them so satisfactorily, and with so much 
calmness and wisdom, that the Dutch boers ever after that always 
addressed him, though still only twenty-seven years of age, by their 
title of highest honour, viz., “ Old Mynheer Bell.” 
He was next appointed to organise a survey office in the eastern 
