Vinegar has the peculiar property of rendering this poison perfectly inert, whether in or out of the body.  When mixed with vinegar, the poison may be drunk with safety, while, if only tasted by itself, it causes a burning sensation in the throat.  This gentleman described the action of the vinegar, when he was nearly deprived of power by the poison imbibed, to have been as if electricity had run along his nerves as soon as he had taken a single glassful.  The cure was instantaneous and complete.  I had always to regret want of opportunity for investigating this remarkable and yet controllable agent on the nervous system.  Its usual proximity to camel-thorn-trees may be accounted for by the probability that the giraffe, which feeds on this tree, may make use of the plant as a medicine.

During the period of my visit at Kuruman, Mr. Moffat, who has been a missionary in Africa during upward of forty years, and is well known by his interesting work, “Scenes and Labors in South Africa”, was busily engaged in carrying through the press, with which his station is furnished, the Bible in the language of the Bechuanas, which is called Sichuana.  This has been a work of immense labor; and as he was the first to reduce their speech to a written form, and has had his attention directed to the study for at least thirty years, he may be supposed to be better adapted for the task than any man living.  Some idea of the copiousness of the language may be formed from the fact that even he never spends a week at his work without discovering new words; the phenomenon, therefore, of any man who, after a few months’ or years’ study of a native tongue, cackles forth a torrent of vocables, may well be wondered at, if it is meant to convey instruction.  In my own case, though I have had as much intercourse with the purest idiom as most Englishmen, and have studied the language carefully, yet I can never utter an important statement without doing so very slowly, and repeating it too, lest the foreign accent, which is distinctly perceptible in all Europeans, should render the sense unintelligible.  In this I follow the example of the Bechuana orators, who, on important matters, always speak slowly, deliberately, and with reiteration.  The capabilities of this language may be inferred from the fact that the Pentateuch is fully expressed in Mr. Moffat’s translation in fewer words than in the Greek Septuagint, and in a very considerably smaller number than in our own English version.  The language is, however, so simple in its construction, that its copiousness by no means requires the explanation that the people have fallen from a former state of civilization and culture.  Language seems to be an attribute of the human mind and thought; and the inflections, various as they are in the most barbarous tongues, as that of the Bushmen, are probably only proofs of the race being human, and endowed with the power of thinking; the fuller development of language