spite of its heat, the country
is well fitted to maintain in vigour a race drawn from the cooler parts
of Europe. Comparatively few adult Englishmen sprung from fathers
themselves born in Africa are as yet to be found. But the descendants of
the Dutch and Huguenot settlers are Africanders up to the sixth or
seventh generation, and the stock shows no sign of losing either its
stature or its physical strength. Athletic sports are pursued as eagerly
as in England.

CHAPTER III

WILD ANIMALS AND THEIR FATE

When first explored, South Africa was unusually rich in the kinds both
of plants and of animals which it contained; and until forty or fifty
years ago the number, size, and beauty of its wild creatures were the
things by which it was chiefly known to Europeans, who had little
suspicion of its mineral wealth, and little foreboding of the trouble
that wealth would cause. Why it was so rich in species is a question on
which geology will one day be able to throw light, for much may depend
on the relations of land and sea in earlier epochs of the earth's
history. Probably the great diversities of elevation and of climate
which exist in the southern part of the continent have contributed to
this profuse variety; and the fact that the country was occupied only by
savages, who did little or nothing to extinguish any species nature had
planted, may have caused many weak species to survive when equally weak
ones were perishing in Asia and Europe at the hands of more advanced
races of mankind. The country was therefore the paradise of hunters.
Besides the lion and the leopard, there were many other great cats, some
of remarkable beauty. Besides the elephant, which was in some districts
very abundant, there existed two kinds of rhinoceros, as well as the
hippopotamus and the giraffe. There was a wonderful profusion of
antelopes,--thirty-one species have been enumerated,--including such
noble animals as the eland and koodoo, such beautiful ones as the
springbok and klipspringer, such fierce ones as the blue wildebeest or
gnu. There were two kinds of zebra, a quagga, and a buffalo, both huge
and dangerous. Probably nowhere in the world could so great a variety of
beautiful animals be seen or a larger variety of formidable ones be
pursued.

All this has changed, and changed of late years with fatal speed, under
the increasing range and accuracy of firearms, the increasing
accessibility of the country to the European sport