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 of t