atopyga, so characteristic of Arabs and other
African tribes; and it is probable that the interior Boers in another
century will become in color what the learned imagine our progenitors,
Adam and Eve, to have been.

The parts of the colony through which we passed were of sterile aspect;
and, as the present winter had been preceded by a severe drought,
many farmers had lost two thirds of their stock. The landscape was
uninviting; the hills, destitute of trees, were of a dark brown color,
and the scanty vegetation on the plains made me feel that they deserved
the name of Desert more than the Kalahari. When first taken possession
of, these parts are said to have been covered with a coating of grass,
but that has disappeared with the antelopes which fed upon it, and
a crop of mesembryanthemums and crassulas occupies its place. It is
curious to observe how, in nature, organizations the most dissimilar
are mutually dependent on each other for their perpetuation. Here the
original grasses were dependent for dissemination on the grass-feeding
animals, which scattered the seeds. When, by the death of the antelopes,
no fresh sowing was made, the African droughts proved too much for
this form of vegetation. But even this contingency was foreseen by
the Omniscient One; for, as we may now observe in the Kalahari Desert,
another family of plants, the mesembryanthemums, stood ready to
neutralize the aridity which must otherwise have followed. This family
of plants possesses seed-vessels which remain firmly shut on their
contents while the soil is hot and dry, and thus preserve the vegetative
power intact during the highest heat of the torrid sun; but when rain
falls, the seed-vessel opens and sheds its contents just when there is
the greatest probability of their vegetating. In other plants heat and
drought cause the seed-vessels to burst and shed their charge.

One of this family is edible ('Mesembryanthemum edule'); another
possesses a tuberous root, which may be eaten raw; and all are furnished
with thick, fleshy leaves, having pores capable of imbibing and
retaining moisture from a very dry atmosphere and soil, so that, if
a leaf is broken during a period of the greatest drought, it shows
abundant circulating sap. The plants of this family are found much
farther north, but the great abundance of the grasses prevents them from
making any show. There, however, they stand ready to fill up any gap
which may occur in the present preva