102 
HOESE-SICKNESS, 
Chap. Y. 
latter montli^ is tlie only period in winch 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 espe¬ 
cially 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 tliis disease is 
eaten, it causes a malignant carbuncle; wliich, when it appears 
over any important organ, proves rapidly fatal. It is more 
especially dangerous over the pit of the stomach. The eflects of 
the poison have been experienced by missionaries who had eaten 
properly cooked food, the flesh of sheep really but not visibly 
affected by the disease. The virus in the flesh of the animal is de¬ 
stroyed neither by boiling nor roasting. This fact, of which we have 
had innumerable examples, shows the superiority of experiments 
on a large scale to those of acute and able physiologists and 
chemists in the laboratory, for a well-known physician of Paris, 
after careful investigation, considered that the virus in such cases 
was completely neutralized by boiling. 
Tliis disease attacks wild animals too. During our residence 
at Chonuane great numbers of tolos, or koodoos, were attracted 
to the gardens of the Bakwains, abandoned at the usual period 
of harvest because there was no prospect of the corn {Holcus 
sorghum) bearing that year. The koodoo is remarkably fond of 
the green stalks of this kind of millet. Free feeding produced 
that state of fatness favomnble for the development of the disease, 
and no fewer than twenty-five died on the hill opposite our house. 
Great numbers of gnus and zebras perished from the same cause, 
but the mortahty produced no sensible diminution in the numbers 
of the game, any more than the deaths of many of the Bakwauis 
who persisted, in spite of every remonstrance, in eating the dead 
meat, caused any sensible decrease in the strength of the tribe. 
The farms of the Boers consist generally of a small patch of 
cultivated land in the midst of some miles of pasturage. They 
are thus less an agricultural than a pastoral people. Each farm 
