From the text...'In the same paper Phillips briefly discussed the effects of fire, a subject of great complexity, and most of the results listed by him are deleterious. In Karamoja, the fires which are started on the mountains by the honey collectors, who use smoke to overcome the wild bees, are responsible for great damage and have destroyed large areas of forest. The Karamojong also make special visits to the grasslands in the west in order to burn the grasslands before the end of the rainy season, so that there might be a flush of young grass for the dry-season grazing; from the appearance of the vegetation, it seems that such fires do not have a bad effect. Early burning does not seem to do great harm to many species which are common in the deciduous woodlands of East Africa; in fact, it seems that burning is essential if the seeds of some trees, for example Butyrospermum parkii Kotschy., are to germinate well. In addition, there must be an important indirect effect from the destruction of grasshoppers and other insects by fire; those which endeavour to escape are captured by the large flocks of birds which congregate at the edge of grass fires, gorging themelves so much that sometimes they are unable to fly. Burtt (1942) has stressed the point that many of the shrubs in the thicket communities are easily killed by fire. The 'hard pan' soils that he described and the vegetation growing on them closely resemble the thickets and soils near settlements in Karamoja. He mentioned that the hard pan was not at the surface, as in Karamoja, but was situated at a depth of about a foot; similar hard pans, and sometimes two or three of them one above the other, may be seen exposed on the vertical sides of river courses in eastern Karamoja, where it is obvious that they are buried land surfaces. It therefore seems probable that the 'hard pans' in Tanganyika may have been formed by the trampling of wild or domestic animals; the situation is significant-'these hard pan areas fringe the black cotton soils of the 'mbugas' (valley grasslands)'-for, as mentioned above, it is in similar places that the bad effects of over-grazing and trampling by cattle are most evident in the Lake Kyoga basin. Milne (1936) has pointed out the difficulty of explaining the distribution and the composition of these 'hard pan' soils on the basis of parent rock and of climate, so it is probable that biological factors are also involved.'