Pioneers in South Africa (1914) (14576709878)

Identifier: pioneersinsoutha00johnuoft (find matches)
Title: Pioneers in South Africa
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Johnston, Harry Hamilton, Sir, 1858-1927
Subjects: South Africa -- Discovery and exploration South Africa -- Description and travel
Publisher: London Blackie
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN



Text Appearing Before Image:
ras, ante-lopes, ostriches, rhinoceroses, elephants, buffaloes, andpigs. One point, however, must be impressed on the atten-tion of the reader—the division of the land-area betweenthe equator in the north and the Cape of Good Hope inthe south into regions with peculiar fauna as well asflora. Africa south of the Zambezi river and of the Kwanza(in Angola) was in many respects very different in itsbeasts and birds from Central and East Africa, outsidethe Congo forests; and the Congo and Cameroons forestregion constituted a third region—the West Equatorial.The fauna and flora of true South Africa (from whichagain must be divided off the very peculiar Cape-of-Good-Hope region of small extent) resembled those of EquatorialEast Africa and of Somaliland, the Sahara and Senegal,far more than the adjacent fauna and flora of CentralAfrica: the Zambezi and Kwanza being the boundarybetween the two. Thus many beasts, birds, reptiles, andinsects of South Africa are not found north of the Zambezi
Text Appearing After Image:
As the White Man first saw it 33 till the traveller has reached the drier regions of equatorialEast Africa or Somaliland or Senegal. Attendant on these herds of big game in Central andinner South Africa were swarms of flies, which occasion-ally would drive buffaloes and rhinoceroses so mad thatthey would resort to the mud of rivers and swamps as arefuge from their persecutors. Amongst these flies wasthe tse-tse, so inimical afterwards to the white man and hisimported horses and cattle, conveying through its pro-boscis the germs of mortal diseases, derived from theblood of the wild animals, which in course of time had be-come immune to these maladies, as had also, to a muchless extent, the indigenous Negroes. Not only did fliesand mosquitoes transmit disease, often of a fatal kind—tothe Arab, the foreign Negro, the earliest Europeans (as to the white men of the present day)—but several kinds oftick performed the same malign purpose. These ticks—adegenerate order of spiders to whic