192 Scientific Reviews. 
land, the price of a wife was one ox ; if so, the commodity is raised. 
This woman, who was of the lower order, and by no means beauti- 
ful, was valued at eight. Conguar told us, that one of his, a 
daughter of St’ lamby, had stood him in forty, while I was asked 
fifty. It is pleasant and gratifying to see the sex taking their true 
station and value in society,” (p. 194.) We shall terminate the no- 
tice of Mr. Rose’s work by two more extracts ; the first relating to 
the new settlement of Graham’s Town, and in the second we oe 
accompany the author in an elephant hunt. 
*¢ Graham’s Town, now a large, ugly, ill-built, straggling place, containing, 
{ should think, nearly three thousand inhabitants ‘and soldiers, was a few years” 
back only a military post, and the mimosa tree stands in the principal street, be- 
neath which, it is said, the first English officer, Colonel Graham, who led a mi-. 
litary party there, pitched his tent. Colonel Graham is dead, and the second 
town in the colony bears his name,—a name that is often mentioned, and always 
with respect. 
“< Houses have sprung up quickly of every variety of form, and barracks, and 
a church for the established faith, and chapels for all sects—Dissenters, Wesley- 
ans, Anabaptists, Independents, &c. and last, not least, the handsomest build- 
ing, and the most necessary, is a gaol. ; 
“* The population is a strange mixture of lounging officers, idle tradesmen, 
{merchants, I beg their pardon,) drunken soldiers, and still more drunken set- 
tlers. 
“© We have a circulating-library, and a fashionable tailor, whose shopboard 
announces that he comes from the Quadrant. Piano-forte tuners, a seminary for 
young ladies, and an artist, who in England was employed to copy Varley’s 
drawings, and who succeeded, by his own account, so well, as to have his copies 
always mistaken for the originals; but, alas! Africa affords no encouragement 
to art ; he lives in a mud-hovel, hawks about his drawings in vain, and his pen- 
cil fails to keep him in Cape brandy.”—P. 45, 46. : 
And now to penetrate the deserts. 
‘ The country we were traversing was singularly wild,—savage nature unre- 
claimed,—no blue smoke-amidst the dark-green hills and shadowy hollows told 
of an habitation ; even the roads are the work of the elephant. Man has never 
appeared in those tremendous sclitudes, save as a destroyer. Al was still, yet 
at intervals there came upon the ear the distant sound of a passing bell, heavy 
and slow like the death-toll ; all again was still, and again the bell-bird’s note 
came born upon the wind: we never seemed to approach it, but that low, melan- 
choly, distant dreamlike sound, still continued at times to haunt us like an omen 
of evil. 
“ We threaded the elephant paths with a swift silent pace, over hills and 
through ravines, until, from having been long unaccustomed to walking in this” 
riding country, I began, greatly to the surprise of the hunter, to show symptoms 
of fatigue. ‘‘ We shall soon be among the elephants,”’ he said, ‘‘ and then we 
can sit down and watch them.”’ Forward we went—now in shadow, and now in 
light, as we wound through the high bush ; the light now glancing on the strange 
head-gear of the leading Hottentot, now touching the yellow handkerchief that 
bound the hunter’s head ; now the blue one, that shadowed the fair brow of the 
boy, and now running in ‘a line along the muzzles of the large guns 5 ee apa 
they were lost in the gloom of some dark descent, or rocky ravine. 
“* We had frequently traced the mighty Gaepants of the elephants ; from 
which the Hottentots told us when the animals had been there. ‘* This is three 
days old,”—“ This is last night.” It was curious to observe the marks stamped 
in the mud around the small ponds, of animals that left their haunts at night te 
drink. - The misshapen spoor of the elephant ; that of the rhinoceros, resembling’ 
