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district of the colony, where so many Scotch settlers were established 
under Pringle and others many years before, in what the Dutch 
had stigmatised as the “ Zuureveld,” or field where the grass was 
sour, and in their eyes, and to their means and resources, good for 
nothing, except to stick Englishmen in, to serve as buffer between 
them and the Kaffirs. From thence he was taken for a time by the 
new Governor of the colony, Sir Peregrine Maitland, to inspect the 
Kaffir frontier and interior districts. And again, in 1845, across the 
. upper Orange Fiver to Zwartkopjies, “ where,” says a local print, 
“the information he had acquired in the expedition of 1833 was 
found extremely useful.” No doubt it was, too, and yet not suffi- 
ciently utilised by the Government at home; for had it been, 
several calamitous disasters of recent years, and excitations of inter- 
national hatred in the north-east of that country, would have been 
avoided. The distribution, too, of the British settlers would have 
been arranged in a manner to profit far more by the physical geo- 
graphy of South Africa ; which offers a Brazilian climate on one side 
against an Arabia Deserta on the other, if you only go far enough 
in either direction from the intermediate point of Table Mountain 
and Table Bay, where the Dutch first landed, and for so long looked 
upon it as their only and commanding centre for their agriculture, 
commerce, and government in all the southern hemisphere. 
In 1848 Mr. Bell became, on the demise of Colonel Mitchell (a 
demise much lamented, and hastened in no small degree by the extra 
anxieties of his office), full Surveyor-General of the Cape of Good 
Hope. Thenceforward, for twenty-six years, he ruled in that 
department with a suavity, firmness, and knowledge that obtained 
the best possible results for Government, out of an otherwise almost 
hopeless, tangled collection of conflicting interests, old legislations, 
and changed ideas. His thorough knowledge of the colony in which 
he had grown up to man’s estate, his mature development of a 
judicial breadth of view, combined with his scientific skill and 
mechanical abilities, were evidently becoming more and more appre- 
ciated ; for, spite of the over-work of his own office, he was so 
frequently requested to join divers Government committees, and 
prepare special reports, such as that on the establishment for con- 
victs, lepers, and lunatics on Robben Island, the newly-found copper 
fields of Little Nam aqua land : and various lines of road to open up 
