When first taken possession of, these parts are said to have been covered with a coating of grass, but that has disappeared with the antelopes which fed upon it, and a crop of mesembryanthemums and crassulas occupies its place.

It is curious to observe how, in nature, organizations the most dissimilar are mutually dependent on each other for their perpetuation.

Here the original grasses were dependent for dissemination on the grass-feeding animals, which scattered the seeds.

When, by the death of the antelopes, no fresh sowing was made, the African droughts proved too much for this form of vegetation.

But even this contingency was foreseen by the Omniscient One; for, as we may now observe in the Kalahari Desert, another family of plants, the mesembryanthemums, stood ready to neutralize the aridity which must otherwise have followed.