lack of comfort so general. South Africa's chief source of wealth is, and always will be, its minerals. It was, strangely enough, the latest source to become known, for nobody suspected it until, in 1867, a Boer hunter, his eye caught by a sparkle among the pebbles on the Orange River, picked up the first diamond. The diamonds found in that region since then have amounted in value to nearly a billion dollars. Fifteen years after the great diamond finds which sent the adventurers and fortune-seekers of the world thronging to South Africa, came the still greater gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand, or “The Rand,” as the reef of gold-bearing quartz in the Transvaal is commonly called. The total value of the gold production of the Rand for the twenty-five years ending in June, 1910, was nearly one and a half billion dollars. But though the Rand produces more gold than America and Australia put together; though Kimberley has a virtual monopoly of the world's supply of diamonds; though seams of silver, iron, coal, copper, and tin are only waiting for capital and skill to unlock their treasures, South Africa is, in the midst of this stupendous wealth, poor, for she is as dependent on foreign sources for her food supply as England. In other words, a region as large as all the States west of the Rocky Mountains, in which flourish nearly all the products of every zone from the Equator to the Pole, is unable to supply the wants of a white population which is less than that of Connecticut. In California, on the other hand, which is strikingly similar to South Africa in many respects, the cultivation of the land kept pace with the production of gold and eventually outstripped it. Until the mining industry of South Africa is likewise put upon a solid agricultural foundation, the country can never hope to be self-supporting.