Naturalist in the Transvaal (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Excerpt from Naturalist in the Transvaal

In my schoolboy days a journey through the Trans vaal would have almost attained the dignity of an ex ploration now Pretoria can be reached in three weeks' time from London, and the once long wagon-trek from the Cape is replaced by less than two days' train and a little more than two days' coach service. But this facility of transit, so valued by the business man and so necessary to the material development of the country, has deprived the sportsman of a hunting-ground and curtailed the view of the naturalist. N 0 longer do vast herds of ruminants roam over these solitary plains, for when commerce reached the land, and bid for the skins of the buck and antelope, the Boer accepted the price and slaughtered, if not actually exterminated, the finestruminant fauna that ever a land possessed. Further inland the Kafir, armed with a gun, pursues the same desultory warfare, and this portion of Southern Africa has completely lost what was once its most distinctive zoological feature. This animal extinction has also reacted on the Boer himself: now no longer the mighty hunter, he will soon cease to be the matchless marks man as of old; and his life on the solitary farm is thereby rendered more monotonous, for the gun was once his constant companion. When railways intersect the country the ox-wagon will gradually disappear, and with it the last characteristic feature of the old voor trekkers.

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