These salt-pans are quite dry and free from water for some four or five months a year, when there is no salt to be seen, and it is not until the rainy season is over, and the water that has collected in the pans during that time (some two feet deep) has in the course of a few months evaporated, that the salt appears to have been drawn from the deposit below to the surface by the action of the water upon it, and a thick deposit is left, which is collected by the proprietor, and sold at various prices. I have paid for a sack containing 200 lbs. 3 shillings and sometimes 5 shillings, according to the supply and demand. Some salt-pans do not give a sufficient deposit to pay the cost of collecting. There is a great sale for it throughout the country; but table-salt is supplied from England, as there has been no means of cleaning the native salt from the impurities it contains. The Boers and natives use it. Some of these salt-pans will yield in the season nearly 1000 nuids of 200 lbs. each, and yet there appears to be no diminution in the supply, showing there must be extensive deposits beneath the pan beds. And so impregnated are some portions of these extensive grass plains that the grass that grows upon them is called the sour veldt, and other parts, where the surface-soil has been washed down from a higher level and deposited on the flats, is called the sweet veldt. The sour veldt is easily distinguishable by the white coating on the ground, which the oxen lick when they want salt. I always kept my oxen in good condition by giving them salt, once or twice a week, from a supply kept in the waggon for them, and it is a great preventative also against that common sickness the lungsick, which is very fatal to oxen all through South Africa. There are several salt and brack-pans in the northern division of the republic, but the most numerous and the largest are to the south of New Scotland. Lake Cressie is the most extensive, in shape something like a horse-shoe, and nearly twenty miles round, lying in an open grass country with few bushes. The water in it is permanent, and cannot be very brackish, as a hippopotamus has been known to live in it since it was first discovered. The road from Lydenburg to Wakkerstroom passes on the east side of the head of Lake Cressie, where there is a store, and a more desolate-looking country to pass through is rarely to be found.