Guided, then, by the latter consideration, and by the reflection that every day the number of our countrymen is increasing who look to South Africa with a growing interest--whether as a land for colonization, exploration, or scientific research,--I venture to add another to the long list of already published books upon that country, hoping that the reader may find therein matter of some general interest, and that, if not, he will look leniently on the error of judgment which has led me, together with those who have here shared my responsibility, to offer for his perusal pages prepared at first mainly for private friends, but which it was afterwards thought might possibly prove of interest to a somewhat wider circle. Further, with reference to the length of time which has elapsed between the date of the writer’s death and the publication of this volume, I can only claim in extenuation of this circumstance the fact that a considerable period necessarily intervened before the traveller’s journals and papers reached this country, that they required on their arrival much care in their disposal, and that the whole of the natural history collections had to be gone through systematically before being finally placed in competent hands for arrangement and classification. The delay, then, has enabled me to include in the volume the papers in the appendix on the latter subject, contributed by such able hands, which I believe will add interest to the whole; and that not only in the case of scientific readers, but of all those who would realize in a measure what it is which makes up the life and experiences of the naturalist traveller in his wanderings in distant lands. I may add, moreover, that the general state and condition of the country of which these pages treat would appear, from the accounts of those who have recently visited it, to remain substantially the same, or only changed in points of minor interest. The abandonment, however, of the Tati Gold-mine and the establishment of Kama in the Bamangwato sovereignty perhaps demand attention. In editing this work it has been my object to preserve, wherever possible, the writer’s narrative in exactly his own words; and this plan has been steadily adhered to throughout, those passages only being omitted which appeared little likely to interest the general reader, or in which--as several times occurred--old ground was re-traversed. In such cases the intervening periods have been bridged over by a short narrative of my own, intended merely to connect the story and weld the whole together. The maps, it may be added, are all of them the result of the traveller’s own special observations, recorded as he went along.