stances. in all places and under all circumA little casket not larger than a snuff-box frequently enshrines a favourite divinity. Solitary devotion, it is true, requires not the space that is necessary for congregational worship. A tutelar deity may be placed in any corner of the house, or carried about in the pocket. "The Cochinchinese are extremely superstitious, and their devotional exercises, like those of the Chinese, are more frequently performed with the view of averting an ideal evil, than with the hope of acquiring a positive good; or, in other words, the evil spirit is more dreaded than the good one revered. In various parts of the country are large wooden stakes or pillars erected, not only for the purpose of marking the spot where some great calamity, either of a public or a private nature, may have happened, as the loss of a battle, the murder of an individual, or other unfortunate event, but as a propitiation to the evil spirit by whose influence it is supposed to have been occasioned. So also when an infant dies, the parents are supposed to have incurred the displeasure of some malignant spirit, which they endeavour to appease by offerings of rice, oil, tea, money, or whatever they may imagine to be the most acceptable to the angry divinity. From such sentiments one may venture to hope that the horrid practice of infanticide is not among the bad customs they have retained of the Chinese. "Beside the spontaneous offer ings which individuals conceive it necessary to make on various occasions, i seems that a yearly contribution, levied by government, is paid for the support of a certain number of monasteries, in witch the priests invoke the deity for the public welfare. This contribution consists of produce in kind, as rice, fruits, sugar, areca nut, and other articles; in lieu of which, in towns, are collected money, metals, clothing, and such like. The priests here, as in China, are considered to be the best physicians; but their art lies more in charms and fasci nations than in the judicious appli cation of sanative drugs. "It may be inferred that the fundamental principles of the Cochinchinese government are the same as those of China; that they have the same laws and the same modes of punishment: but on this subject I am unable to communicate any information. In the open building adjoining that where the ruling mandarin resided, we sw both the Teka and the Pan-tsé (e cangue and the bamboo); but whether the execution of the laws are here less rigidly attended to, or the morals of the people less corrupt, than in China, I will not pretend to say: it may be observed, however, that not a single purishment of any description occurred to our notice, whereas in China we scarcely ever passed a town or vil lage in which our eyes were not offended at the sight of the cangue, or the ears assailed with the cries of persons suffering under the stroke of the bamboo. There, indeed, the mandarins, however corrupt and debauched in private lite, assume in public an austerity of conduct, which gives a sanction to their corrections; but a mandarin of Cochinchina, who openly violates the the rules of decorum, and sets in his own person the example of levity and licentiousness, could but with a very bad grace direct and superintend the punishment of another less guilty than himself. At all events, the spirit of the people of Turon did not appear to suffer any depression from atoosevere exercise of the hand of power. DESCRIPTION of the BOSJESMEN of SOUTHERN AFRICA. AVING received from his down its rocky channel no less than "Hexcellency lieutenant-gene seven times); their passage of the ra Dundas, acting governor and commander in chief of the castle, town, and settlement of the Cape of Good Hope, cur credentials and instructions, examined the invoice of the several articles intended to be given in exchange for cattle, and arranged the contents of our six waggons, we this day,' says Mr. Truter, the first of October 1801, commenced, under God's good providence, our long and interesting journey.' After a minute detail of every particular circumstance that occurred, and a relation of the ordinary events of such a journey; the names of the several farms and their occupiers where they halted for the night, or for obtaining refreshment or a change of draught oxen; the little interruptions and mortifications they met with, owing to the want of punctuality in the boers in bringing their fresh relays of oxen, to the breaking of axletrees, yokes, and traces; the difficulty of ascending Roode Sand Kloof; the impracticability of passing the Witsenbergh or Mostaert Hoek, which compelled them to take the circuitous route over the Hex, River Kloof, (in their progress through which, Mr. Truter observes, they crossed the rapid stream of the same name rushing Bokkeveld, and that corner of the Great Karroo or desert between it and the Roggeveld, where the absence of all human habitations compelled them to sleep for several nights in their tents and waggons; their ascent, from those plains, up the steep and lofty mountains called the Roggeveld :-after surmounting these and many other difficulties they arrived, on the evening of the 14th, on the south bank of the Great Riet river, opposite the Bonteberg, where they pitched. their tents for the night, the weather being extremely cold, boisterous and rainy. In this river they caught anabundance of a particular species of fish, the flavour of which was tolerably good; but the bones being something of the same kind as in the herring, and the fish small, made it the less acceptable to hungry travellers. Here also, for the first time, they observed the fresh prints of the paws of a lion. "Pursuing their journey from hence, after crossing the river several times, they halted at a deserted farin-house called the GonnaKraal, which place had previously been appointed as the rendezvous for the escort of boors that were simmoned to attend the expedition, pedition, as well as for the relays of fresh oxen to draw the waggons over the desert. But having waited here for two days without receiving any intelligence either of the boors or the oxen, they resolved to proceed without them; and accordingly, on the 18th, after crossing the Karree river, which is here considered to be the boundary of the colony, they made a short day's journey and encamped for the night. near the Brakke fontein, where they presently had the great satisfaction to perceive, at some distance, a party of boors and Hottentots and cattle hastening towards them over the plain. Their joy, however, was of short duration, and followed by vexation and disappointment; for, on examining the oxen, the greater part were found to be very young, totally unaccustomed to the yoke, and not a single good team could be selected from the whole drove. "Determined, notwithstanding this grievous disappointment, to prosecute the journey they had undertaken, and being now advanced beyond the limits of the colony, it was deemed expedient, in the first place, to muster the party, to ascertain the strength of the expedition, and to prescribe certain regulations for their conduct, which were rigidly to be adhered to during the journey before them, whose distance and duration were equally uncertain. "The account of the whole expedition was found to stand as follows: Seven Dutch boors, inhabitants of the Roggeveld. Making in the whole twelve 24 Hottentots and bastard Hot- 120 Draught oxen. 18 Saddle-horses, and 20 Large muskets. "With the blessing of God,' observes Mr. Truter, we considered these our numbers and our means of defence to be fully sufficient for our protection and preservation; and, confiding in his goodness, we launched upon the Karroo or desert plains, on the 20th October.' Little occurred in their journey over these dreary solitudes to engage the attention, except their uncommon sterility, and now and then a few quachas or wild horses, a solitary gemsbok, an eland, a hartebeest, or a pair of ostriches, which might perhaps be observed grazing at a distance, or scouring away to avoid the party, when they happened to approach them unperceived. In the course of the third day they passed the ruins of an earthen building of considerable dimensions, surrounded by a number of demolished huts, which they were informed were the remains of an establishment attempted to be formed by the two gospel missionaries Kicherer and Edwards, under the direction of the society for sending missions into Africa and the East. Proceeding slowly till midnight, they halted on the bank of the Sack river, near which, the next morn ing, they observed another kraal or hamlet in ruins, where these missi onaries had held a temporary resi dence. At this place two miser able able-looking wretches, of the tribe of men usually called Bosjesmen by the colonists, perfectly naked, and apparently perishing with hunger, advanced towards the encamp ment, and accosted the party in a language wholly unintelligible: but the signs they made use of could not easily be mistaken. They gave them something to eat, which, with a little tobacco, had an instantaneous effect on their spirits, and caused them to dance for joy. They were just able to make the party understand that their names were Jacob and Jeptha, and that they had been disciples of the two missionaries above-mentioned. "Pursuing their journey over these dreary and desolate plains, where few living creatures except a quacha, a harte-beest, or an ostrich were occasionally seen browsing at a distance, the party arrived on the evening of the 23d at a brack or saltish river, where they pitched their tents for the night. Here they were again accosted by a solitary Bosjesman, who called himself Wildboy, indicating by signs, for not a creature could coniprehend the meaning of a single syllable he uttered, that he was extremely hungry. Having ordered as much food to be given to him as was sufficient to satisfy the craving of his appetite, he stole away in the course of the night, and they saw no more of him. "At a little distance from the next halting-place, the Lion's fontein, one of the party had the good fortune to shoot a quacha of a larger size than what any of the boors had ever recollected to have seen, of which Mr. Daniell made a very accurate drawing. It was the first wild quadruped they had procured. In the midst of so extensive and dreary a desert they were not a little surprized, though by no means an unusual thing, to meet with a Dutch boor of the name of Kok, who, with a waggon and his whole family, his slaves, his Hottentors, his cattle, and his sheep, was travelling leisurely from the Orange river towards the skirts of the colony. The disinclination of these people to establish themselves on a particular spot, and to live in any sort of comfort, is very remarkable, and can only be explained on the principle of an irresistible charm which unbounded liberty and unrestrained possession exert on the human mind, and which operates most powerfully on him who has never known the pleasures of social lite. It is a well-known fact, that numbers of the French officers in America, led by the impulse of this principle, retired into the Indian settlements, threw aside their clothing, painted and tatooed their bodies, and became, in every respect, savages of a much worse description than the natives, by uniting with their new condition all the vices of civilized life. To rove about the desert wilds of Africa, to harass and destroy the harmless natives, to feast on game procured by their Hottentots, and to sleep and loiter away the day while jolting in his waggon, are to the Dutch boor among the most exquisite pleasures he is capable of enjoying. By indolence and glut tony, from the effects of a good climate and a free exposure to the air, these people usually grow to a monstrous size; and if suffered to continue their present uncontrolled mode of life, they may ultimately give birth to a race of Patagonians on the southern extremity of Africa, not inferior in stature to their tall brethren on the opposite coast of America. "Continuing 66 Continuing their journey on the 28th and 29th over a rugged country and a constant succession of hills, whose surfaces were strewed with a greater abundance of stones than of vegetation, and on which two or three of their waggons broke down, they were under the necessity of halting on both nights, without finding the least grass or any kind of food for the cattle and without a drop of water. This hilly part of the country was called by the boors the Karree bergen. From the feet of these hills a plain of vast extent stretched out to the northward, of a nature altogether different from the Karroo desert over which they had just passed the latter being a solid bed of clay on which little vegetation appears, except a few straggling weak and sickly succulent plants; but the former was thickly covered with long withered grass. On the skirts of this plain our travellers observed at a distance a party of natives intending apparently to approach them. It consisted of eight persons, some partially covered with skins, and others naked; bet all of them armed with bows in their hands, quivers an their backs, and arrows stuck in a fillet bound round the head forming a kind of coronet. Having advanced pretty near the waggons they stopped short; and on being beckoned to come forwards, they made signs, by pointing to the ground, that somebody should first go to them. Accordingly some of the party proceeded towards them, en which they betrayed evident marks of fear. They were presented with some lacquered brass medallions, a couple of grenadiers' caps, a few gilt rings, a little tobacco, and, as they appeared to be greatly in want of food, with a whole sheep, which they immediately killed by cutting the throat; and having divided it among them in shares as nearly equal as they could contrive, including both the skin and the entrails, they walked off with great satisfaction. Shortly after this, three others of the same tribe made their appearance; but all the endeavours of the party to bring them to a conversation were unavailing. Two of them retired, and the third, after much persuasion by signs, advanced near enough to receive a ration of tobacco for himself and two for his companions, when he also instantly vanished. "On the midst of this grassy plain our travellers came to an extensive lake, the water of which was so very salt as to be wholly unfit for use either by man or beast. At the distance of five miles beyond this lake they came to a second, and farther on to a third, all of the same description. Rising by a gentle ascent from this plain to one of much greater elevation, they arrived on the 1st November at the entrance of a poort or chasm in a ridge of high hills, where, for the first time since leaving the mountain of the Roggeveld, à distance not much short of two hundred miles, they had met with any species of plant which could be said to bear the resemblance of a tree. From these lonely wastes of Africa, |