Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/287

Rh sometimes the case, that locality alone is appended to scientific descriptions, specialists should add "Pretoria District."

With the bush country commences an altogether different avian fauna from the scanty one as seen on the barren veld, where mining and commerce hold their sway. Here nature offers nothing but herself, and though the naturalist will rejoice, the incipient Midas will go empty away; it is a great felicity in our journey through this world to now and then reach an oasis which affords no prospect for commercial enterprise, and where natural conditions may survive—especially in the Transvaal. Driving along this road in the Easter holidays of 1894, I witnessed one of those travelling concourses of birds which have been described by Bates on the Amazons, Stolzmann in Peru, Belt in Nicaragua, and Hudson in Patagonia. Most of the local birds were represented, and were constantly crossing the road between the bush; it was not a rush, but more of a social excursion or food exploration from one part of the bush to another; and when I returned along the same road a few days later very few birds were seen, and these only of one or two of the commonest species. I never met with such a moving and varied assembly of birds again, and they were plentiful on and off for at least ten miles of the road. In February of 1891, along this very road, I once witnessed—but from a coach, when I could do nothing—vast quantities of what was to me always a very scarce butterfly, Teracolus celimene, which literally swarmed over damp roadside places. But though I made many subsequent excursions over the same area, at similar and other times of the summer season, and extending over a period of three years, I never met the species again. In this spot and in the month of November a lovely Crinum, apparently C. ammocharoides, may be found in all the luxuriance of its deep red bloom. Its beauty is somewhat short-lived, and I only saw it in bloom during this month. Lieut, von Höhnel found it blooming in the neighbourhood of Lake Stefanie in April, but that date is near the commencement of the rainy season there, as November is in the Transvaal. The plant evidently comes on very rapidly with the first advent of the rains, after having been incased in the brick-like earth during the dry season. It was a most interesting subject to myself as seen in bloom; for long before I dreamed of visiting the African