Occasionally we lighted upon land tortoises, which, with their unlaid eggs, make a very agreeable dish.  We saw many of their trails leading to the salt fountain; they must have come great distances for this health-giving article.  In lieu thereof they often devour wood-ashes.  It is wonderful how this reptile holds its place in the country.  When seen, it never escapes.  The young are taken for the sake of their shells; these are made into boxes, which, filled with sweet-smelling roots, the women hang around their persons.  When older it is used as food, and the shell converted into a rude basin to hold food or water.  It owes its continuance neither to speed nor cunning.  Its color, yellow and dark brown, is well adapted, by its similarity to the surrounding grass and brushwood, to render it indistinguishable; and, though it makes an awkward attempt to run on the approach of man, its trust is in its bony covering, from which even the teeth of a hyaena glance off foiled.  When this long-lived creature is about to deposit her eggs, she lets herself into the ground by throwing the earth up round her shell, until only the top is visible; then covering up the eggs, she leaves them until the rains begin to fall and the fresh herbage appears; the young ones then come out, their shells still quite soft, and, unattended by their dam, begin the world for themselves.  Their food is tender grass and a plant named thotona, and they frequently resort to heaps of ashes and places containing efflorescence of the nitrates for the salts these contain.

Inquiries among the Bushmen and Bakalahari, who are intimately acquainted with the habits of the game, lead to the belief that many diseases prevail among wild animals.  I have seen the kokong or gnu, kama or hartebeest, the tsessebe, kukama, and the giraffe, so mangy as to be uneatable even by the natives.  Reference has already been made to the peripneumonia which cuts off horses, tolos or koodoos.  Great numbers also of zebras are found dead with masses of foam at the nostrils, exactly as occurs in the common “horse-sickness”.  The production of the malignant carbuncle called kuatsi, or selonda, by the flesh when eaten, is another proof of the disease of the tame and wild being identical.  I once found a buffalo blind from ophthalmia standing by the fountain Otse; when he attempted to run he lifted up his feet in the manner peculiar to blind animals.  The rhinoceros has often worms on the conjunction of his eyes; but these are not the cause of the dimness of vision which will make him charge past a man who has wounded him, if he stands perfectly still, in the belief that his enemy is a tree.  It probably arises from the horn being in the line of vision, for the variety named kuabaoba, which has a straight horn directed downward away from that line, possesses acute eyesight, and is much more wary.