facilitated the immigration of plants from various sides, is a matter on
which science cannot yet pronounce, for both the geology and the flora
of the whole African continent have been very imperfectly examined. It
is, however, worth remarking that there are marked affinities between
the general character of the flora of the south-western corner of South
Africa and that of the flora of south-western Australia, and similar
affinities between the flora of south-eastern and tropical Africa and
the flora of India, while the relations to South America are fewer and
much less marked. This fact would seem to point to the great antiquity
of the South Atlantic Ocean.

To give in such a book as this even the scantiest account of the plants
of South Africa would obviously be impossible. All I propose is to
convey some slight impression of the part which its vegetation, and
particularly its trees, play in the landscape and in the economic
conditions of the country. Even this I can do but imperfectly, because,
like most travellers, I passed through large districts in the dry
season, when three-fourths of the herbaceous plants are out of flower.

No part of the country is richer in beautiful flowers than the immediate
neighbourhood of Cape Town. This extreme south-western corner of Africa
has a climate of the south temperate zone; that is to say, it has a real
summer and a real winter, and gets most of its rain in winter, whereas
the rest of South Africa has only a wet season and a dry season, the
latter coming in winter. So, too, this corner round Cape Town has a
vegetation characteristically its own, and differing markedly from that
of the arid Karroo regions to the north, and that of the warm
subtropical regions in the east of the Colony and in Natal. It is here
that the plants flourish which Europeans and Americans first came to
know and which are still to them the most familiar examples of the South
African flora. Heaths, for instance, of which there are said to be no
less than three hundred and fifty species in this small district, some
of extraordinary beauty and brilliance, are scarcely found outside of
it. I saw two or three species on the high peaks of Basutoland, and
believe some occur as far north as the tropic on the tops of the
Quathlamba Range; but in the lower grounds, and even on the plateau of
the Karroo they are absent. The general aspect of the vegetation on the
Karroo, and eastward over the plateau into Bechuana