The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    44/412 (page 34)
    thousand in a troop, on the bank of the Fish River ; and that he and his Hottentots had killed eight hun- dred in twenty months. Mr. Rose was satisfied of their great numbers, from the paths which marked their progress, in all directions, through the country “ which they have possessed for ages,” where all “the roads are the work of the elephant*.” Mr. Pringle, to whose communications we are already so much indebted in the first volume of this work, has favoured us with a description of a herd of wild elephants, presenting a vivid picture of a scene which must be one of the most remarkable that can be pre- sented to the eye in the deep solitudes of a tropical wilderness:— “ A herd of elephants, browsing in majestic tran- quillity amidst the wild magnificence of an African landscape, is a very noble sight, and one of which I shall never forget the impression. It is difficult to convey in a brief notice an adequate idea of such a scene; but if the reader will, in imagination, accom- pany me on a short excursion into the wilderness, I shall endeavour to shew him nt loact what the South Africans oall the sjioor—the vestigia of a troop of elephants. “ During my residence on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, I accompanied a party of English officers on a little exploratory excursion, into a tract of country then termed the Neutral Territory, imme- diately adjoining to the location of the Scottish settlers at Bavian’s River. This territory, which comprises an irregular area of about 2,000,000 of acres, had remained for several years entirely without inha- bitants ; for its native possessors, the Caffers and Ghonaquas, had been expelled from it in 1819 by the colonial forces, and no other permanent inhabitants had yet been allowed to occupy it. The colonists * Four Years in Southern Africa.