raising of grain, and the care of large herds of cattle and sheep. The cattle were mostly the long-horned native cattle of the Hottentots, and the sheep the hairy, fat-tailed, domestic sheep of Africa. Ostrich farming was unknown, and although the Dutch commissioners, De Mist and Janssens, had begun to introduce merino sheep just before the expiration of their administration, wool had not yet figured amongst the exports. The first beneficial effect of British rule was felt in the stemming of the tide of Kafir invasion. This race of Bantu negroes had during the previous century been pressing closer and closer on the extremity of South Africa from the northeast. The earliest branch of the Bantu to reach South Africa were the Herero, who invaded what is now known as Damaraland. But the desert and the Hottentots kept them from either reaching the Atlantic coast or penetrating any further south. Then came the Bechuana, who barely crossed the Orange river; and then, overriding these latter, latest of all in the field, the Zulu-Kafirs, who attempted to enter Cape Colony from the coast region bordering on the Indian Ocean. The _first_ British-Kafir war took place in 1811-12, and ended in the Kafirs being driven eastward of the Sunday River, and further led to their expulsion from the Zuurveld (the modern district of Albany), to the west of the Great Fish river, which was then fixed as the Kafir boundary. In 1817 Lord Charles Somerset, the Governor of the Cape, visited the Zuurveld, and decided that the best obstacle in the way of repeated Kafir invasions would be to settle that district with a stout race of colonists. He therefore obtained a grant from the British Government of £5,000 to promote emigration to the Cape; and in 1820-21, 5,000 British emigrants landed in South Africa, 4,000 of whom were settled in the eastern districts, principally in the county of Albany. This settlement was at first a failure. Few if any of the settlers were skilled agriculturists; they were without any experience of life in a semi-tropical country; the cost of land transport pressed heavily on them; and the grants of land made to each individual were too small. The first few years Nature played her usual tricks; for Nature seems to hate the movement of species and the upsetting of her arrangements. Therefore she sent blight during three years, then floods for another season. The settlers fell into great distress, but in time things righted themselves. Some immigrants moved to the towns of the colony and obtained high wages as artisans; and others who held on to the Zuurveld at last attained prosperity by extending the area of land they occupied, and going in for sheep and cattle runs in preference to corn-growing. The Kafirs however had poured