The Parts Of The Colony Through Which We Passed Were Of Sterile Aspect;
And, As The Present Winter Had Been Preceded By A Severe Drought,
Many Farmers Had Lost Two Thirds Of Their Stock.
The landscape
was uninviting; the hills, destitute of trees, were of a dark brown color,
and the scanty vegetation on the plains made me feel that they deserved
the name of Desert more than the Kalahari.
When first taken possession of,
these parts are said to have been covered with a coating of grass,
but that has disappeared with the antelopes which fed upon it,
and a crop of mesembryanthemums and crassulas occupies its place.
It is curious to observe how, in nature, organizations the most dissimilar
are mutually dependent on each other for their perpetuation.
Here the original grasses were dependent for dissemination
on the grass-feeding animals, which scattered the seeds.
When, by the death of the antelopes, no fresh sowing was made,
the African droughts proved too much for this form of vegetation.
But even this contingency was foreseen by the Omniscient One;
for, as we may now observe in the Kalahari Desert, another family of plants,
the mesembryanthemums, stood ready to neutralize the aridity
which must otherwise have followed. This family of plants
possesses seed-vessels which remain firmly shut on their contents
while the soil is hot and dry, and thus preserve the vegetative power intact
during the highest heat of the torrid sun; but when rain falls,
the seed-vessel opens and sheds its contents just when there is
the greatest probability of their vegetating.
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