582 
professor Branford's address. 
thoughts seem expensive, and to an extent impracticable and of no com¬ 
parative benefit, looking to the vast extent of the farms, but there are 
many districts from which seeds can be collected at little expense, and 
once we give the farms another chance, we may effect glorious results. 
It cannot be doubted that there is in these farms now considered worth¬ 
less for sheep-farming some alteration in the character of the pasturage, 
an absence in many places of those grasses which are observed to exist 
in all their luxuriance at the present time on some of the best sheep 
farms of the present day. To be practical on these points, I would 
surest—although I would rather the suggestion came from some other 
body—that Government should be asked to take up the matter and 
select one of these farms now considered worthless, but formerly amongst 
the best in the country, and order a series of experiments to be con¬ 
ducted thereon for the benefit of the community. The old adage is, 
“ it is no use crying over spilt milk and if upon scientific work being 
carried out, it be found that there is really no balm in Gilead, why there 
the matter must rest. 
“ Let the reminder be ever so unpleasant, we must not forget that in 
years past and in times of great wool sales, when the streets of this city 
were crowded with spans of oxen and heavily-laden wool waggons, 
farmers were prosperous, they grew avaricious, and wanted to become 
rich, irrespective of future consequences. The wool obtained from a 
fair sized flock was not sufficient; increase must succeed increase; no 
thought could be entertained under such apparently permanent pros, 
perity, of such a proceeding as selling an appreciable number of such 
increase of sheep from the farm, and thereby giving nature an oppor¬ 
tunity of recuperating herself, or even keeping up the supply of nutri¬ 
tious material for support of the numerously increasing herds on her 
face, the same herds daily removing from her surface those flesh-forming, 
and wool-growing materials, the product thereof removed through the 
merchant for ever from the land, and the most unappropriated portions 
of which became in most part accumulations of potash and other salts 
with albuminous and gelatinous masses deposited and allowed to remain 
in kraals, never to return to the land, thus gradually but surely making 
most keenly visible the pernicious effects of over-stocking; no concomi¬ 
tant return of food-stimulating material being made by the farmer. The 
results are now too patent both in the character of the food observed in 
various parts of these once great wool and stock-producing districts and 
the physiological and anatomical condition of the digestive organs of 
those animals fed thereon. In my professional investigations from my 
very first visit to this city I have had numerous opportunities of making 
post-mortem examinations, and so impressed have I been with the marked 
differences in the appearance ordinarily visible in the stomach of those of 
those Zuurveld sheep and cattle, especially on the reported bad feeding 
farms and those on Sweetveld. In the former the capacity for food storage 
becomes enormously enlarged, the walls or coats of the stomach, especially 
the rumen or first stomach, becoming dilated, extended, and weakened in 
their powers of contraction, and other functions necessary for healthy diges¬ 
tion. In the latter—the Sweetveld stock, where nutrient food is obtain¬ 
able—the marked difference exists in the capacity being natural,_so 
much so that any of you gentlemen taking the trouble to compare only a 
few cases will be enabled in a short time to say whence the stomach of a 
slaughtered animal was taken, whether sweet or zuur; whether from 
those farms now bad for sheep and cattle, or otherwise. Gentlemen, 
from this circumstance alone, if no other, we ought to endeavour to 
glean some information and draw an inference or two. Why is it, I say, 
