TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

HINTS ON EMIGRATION TO THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, By The Same Author, 4 pages, included with the Introduction.

Facsimile Reprint: 582 + 648 pages, frontispiece portrait, large folding colour map loosely inserted, 20 colour plates - 5 folding, many text illustrations, brown cloth titled gilt on the spine, a very good set.

The edition of this facsimile reprint is limited to 1000 numbered copies. This is no. 348.

Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography volume 1, page 224: . 'The most valuable and accurate work on South Africa published up to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and embracing a description of a large part of the Cape Colony and Bechuanaland at this period. Theal ("History of South Africa, 1795-1834") remarks that the author was "a man of talent, an easy writer, and scrupulously exact in his descriptions," and according to Sclater he was "a most skilful and well-trained zoologist and botanist, and his observations are all accurate and methodical."'

Ian D. Colvin, in his famous introduction to Sydney Mendelssohn’s  South African Bibliography, writes: ‘Of Burchell I might say without much exaggeration that he is in many respects the greatest name in our bibliography. He is not, certainly, one of our greatest travellers, if we judge travel by extent of the new country explored; his greatness lies rather in the quality of his observation. His drawings express the manner of the man he was; in their loving accuracy we see a reflection of a mind devoted to truth for its own sake, not a hard scientific truth as in Barrow, but truth seen with human eyes, in all it colour and beauty. He had a kind of genius for observation, whether in broad outline, as where he describes Cape Town, or in the detail as in his account of a Hottentot’s eyes or an antelope’s horns. Thus, for example, in describing the feathers of the Wilde Paauw, he says: “The irides were of a beautiful, pellucid, changeable, silvery, ferrugineous colour.” Or take this sentence in his description of a vulture: “There was a heaviness in their gait and looks, which made one feel half-inclined to consider them rather as beasts of prey, than as feathered inhabitants of the air.”…To my mind Burchell is the equal of the best in this style of writing; not even Ruskin could have improved on many of his passages.’