The Kalahari or Thirstland Redemption

Abstract

WHILST Man of all races and skin-colours is once more involved in fratricidal quarrels—how Superior Intelligences in more advanced spheres must grin as they watch our wars against one another through super-telescopes or by æthereal telegraphy!—Nature is making one more effort to get rid of man. This time through Drought. She has seemingly hated everything that rose above the mediocre on this planet, whether it was in fish shape, or in the fish-saurian, the dinosaur, the struthious bird, the ungulate mammal, or the brain-worker, Man. She tried to nip us in the bud by reviving the Ice ages which she had used for other destructive purposes in the pre-Cambrian, Devonian, Permian, and Jurassic periods. But this succession of cold spells only braced Northern Man to greater efforts and greater triumphs, and sent Southern Man to grapple with the tropics, and to digest and partly overcome their germ diseases. Now the tropics, and above all the sub-tropical regions, are being threatened by drought. The desert is spreading in sub-tropical North America, in tropical South America, in temperate and sub-tropical Asia and eastern Europe, in northern and north-central Africa, and in that prolongation of the African continent which lies beyond the Zambezi and Kunene Rivers. The Kalahari or Thirstland Redemption. By Prof. E. H. L. Schwarz. Pp. vi + 163 + xiv plates. (Cape Town: T. Maskew Miller; Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, n.d.) Price 8s. 6d. net.