single roll in the great mass we had thrown on one side would have rendered all our labor vain.  It was therefore necessary for us to guard the spot at night.  On these great flats all around we saw in the white sultry glare herds of zebras, gnus, and occasionally buffaloes, standing for days, looking wistfully toward the wells for a share of the nasty water.  It is mere wanton cruelty to take advantage of the necessities of these poor animals, and shoot them down one after another, without intending to make the smallest use of either the flesh, skins, or horns.  In shooting by night, animals are more frequently wounded than killed; the flowing life-stream increases the thirst, so that in desperation they come slowly up to drink in spite of the danger, “I must drink, though I die.”  The ostrich, even when not wounded, can not, with all his wariness, resist the excessive desire to slake his burning thirst.  It is Bushman-like practice to take advantage of its piteous necessities, for most of the feathers they obtain are procured in this way; but they eat the flesh, and are so far justifiable.

I could not order my men to do what I would not do myself, but, though I tried to justify myself on the plea of necessity, I could not adopt this mode of hunting.  If your object is to secure the best specimens for a museum, it may be allowable, and even deserving of commendation, as evincing a desire to kill only those really wanted; but if, as has been practiced by some Griquas and others who came into the country after Mr. Cumming, and fired away indiscriminately, great numbers of animals are wounded and allowed to perish miserably, or are killed on the spot and left to be preyed on by vultures and hyenas, and all for the sole purpose of making a “bag”, then I take it to be evident that such sportsmen are pretty far gone in the hunting form of insanity.

My men shot a black rhinoceros in this way, and I felt glad to get away from the only place in which I ever had any share in night-hunting.  We passed over the immense pan Ntwetwe, on which the latitude could be taken as at sea.  Great tracts of this part of the country are of calcareous tufa, with only a thin coating of soil; numbers of “baobab” and “mopane” trees abound all over this hard, smooth surface.  About two miles beyond the northern bank of the pan we unyoked under a fine specimen of the baobab, here called, in the language of Bechuanas, Mowana; it consisted of six branches united into one trunk.  At three feet from the ground it was eighty-five feet in circumference.

These mowana-trees are the most wonderful examples of vitality in the country; it was therefore with surprise that we came upon a dead one at Tlomtla, a few miles beyond this spot.  It is the same as those which Adamson and others believed, from specimens seen in Western Africa, to have been alive before the flood.  Arguing with a peculiar mental idiosyncracy resembling color-blindness, common among the French