The flora of South Africa is extremely rich, showing a number of genera, and of species which, in proportion to its area, exceeds the number found in most other parts of the world. But whether this wealth is due to the diversity of physical conditions which the country presents, or rather to geological causes, that is, to the fact that there may at some remote period have been land connections with other regions which have facilitated the immigration of plants from various sides, is a matter on which science cannot yet pronounce, for both the geology and the flora of the whole African continent have been very imperfectly examined. It is, however, worth remarking that there are marked affinities between the general character of the flora of the south-western corner of South Africa and that of the flora of south-western Australia, and similar affinities between the flora of south-eastern and tropical Africa and the flora of India, while the relations to South America are fewer and much less marked. This fact would seem to point to the great antiquity of the South Atlantic Ocean. To give in such a book as this even the scantiest account of the plants of South Africa would obviously be impossible. All I propose is to convey some slight impression of the part which its vegetation, and particularly its trees, play in the landscape and in the No part of the country is richer in beautiful flowers than the immediate neighbourhood of Cape Town. This extreme south-western corner of Africa has a climate of the south temperate zone; that is to say, it has a real summer and a real winter, and gets most of its rain in winter, whereas the rest of South Africa has only a wet season and a dry season, the latter coming in winter. So, too, this corner round Cape Town has a vegetation characteristically its own, and differing markedly from that of the arid Karroo regions to the north, and that of the warm subtropical regions in the east of the Colony and in Natal. It is here that the plants flourish which Europeans and Americans first came to know and which are still to them the most familiar examples of the South African flora. Heaths, for instance, of which there are said to be no less than three hundred and fifty species in this small district, some of extraordinary beauty and brilliance, are scarcely found outside of it. I saw two or three species on the high peaks of Basutoland, and believe some occur as far north as the tropic on the tops of the Quathlamba Range; but in the lower grounds, and even on the plateau of the Karroo they are absent. The general aspect of the vegetation on the Karroo, and eastward over the plateau into Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, is to the traveller's eye monotonous—a fact due to the general uniformity of the geological formations and the general dryness of the surface. In Natal and in Mashonaland types different from those of either the Cape or the Karroo appear, and I have never seen a more beautiful and varied alpine flora than on a lofty summit of Basutoland which I ascended in early summer. But even in Mashonaland, and in Matabililand still more, However, I must avoid details, especially details which would be interesting only to a botanist, and be content with a few words on those more conspicuous features of the vegetation which the traveller notes, and which go to make up his general impression of the country. Speaking broadly, South Africa is a bare country, and this is the more remarkable because it is a new country, where man has not had time to work much destruction. There are ancient forests along the south coast of Cape Colony and Natal, the best of which are (in the former colony) now carefully preserved and administered by a Forest Department of Government. Such is the great Knysna forest, where elephants still roam wild. But even in these forests few trees exceed fifty or sixty feet in height, the tallest being the so-called yellow-wood, and the most useful the sneeze-wood. On the slopes of the hills above Graham's Town and King William's Town one finds (besides real forests here and there) immense masses of dense scrub, or "bush," usually from four to eight feet in height, sometimes with patches of the prickly-pear, an invader from America, and a formidable one; for its spines hurt the cattle and make passage by men a troublesome business. It was this dense, low scrub which constituted the great difficulty of British troops in the fierce and protracted Kafir wars of fifty years ago; for the ground which the scrub covers was impassable except by nar If this is the character of the woods within reach of the coast rains, much more conspicuous is the want of trees and the poorness of those scattered here and there on the great interior plateau. In the desert region, that is to say, the Karroo, the northern part of Cape Colony to the Orange River, western Bechuanaland, and the German territories of Namaqualand and Damaraland, there are hardly any trees, except small, thorny mimosas (they are really acacias, the commonest being Acacia horrida), whose scanty, light-green foliage casts little shade. On the higher mountains, where there is a little more moisture, a few other shrubs or small trees may be found, and sometimes beside a watercourse, where a stream runs during the rains, the eye is refreshed by a few slender willows; but speaking generally, this huge desert, one-third of South Africa, contains nothing but low bushes, few of which are fit even for fuel. Farther east, where the rainfall is heavier, the trees, though still small, are more frequent and less thorny. Parts of the great plain round Kimberley were tolerably well wooded thirty years ago, but the trees have all been cut down The poverty of the woods in Bechuanaland and Matabililand seems to be due not merely to the dryness of the soil and to the thin and sandy character which so often marks it, but also to the constant grass-fires. The grass is generally short, so that these fires do not kill the trees; nor does one hear of such great forest conflagrations as are frequent and ruinous in Western America and by no means unknown in the south of Cape Colony. But these fires doubtless injure the younger trees sufficiently to stunt their growth, and this mischief is, of course, all the greater when an exceptionally dry year occurs. In such years the grass-fires, then most frequent, may destroy the promise of the wood over a vast area. The want of forests in South Africa is one of the greatest misfortunes of the country, for it makes timber costly; it helps to reduce the rainfall, and it aggravates the tendency of the rain, when it comes, to run off rapidly in a sudden freshet. Forests have a powerful influence upon climate in holding moisture, The changes which man has produced in the aspect of countries, by the trees he plants and the crops he sows, are a curious subject for inquiry to the geographer and the historian. These changes sometimes take place very rapidly. In the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, discovered by Captain Cook little more than a century ago, many of the shrubs which most abound and give its tone to the landscape have come (and that mostly not by planting, but spontaneously) from the shores of Asia and America within the last eighty years. In Egypt most of the trees which fill the eye in the drive from Cairo to the pyramids were introduced by Mehemet Ali, so that the banks of the Nile, as we see them, are different not only from those which Herodotus saw, but even from those which Napoleon saw. In North Africa the Central American prickly-pear and the Australian gum make the landscape quite different from that of Carthaginian or even of Roman |