A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science / There are a number of recorded difficulties in classing lithop species according to their phenotype alone. DNA profiling, which can provide a quantitative measure of the degree of sequence similarity between any two genomic DNA's, is the method of choice for establishing phylogenetic relationships between species. (Abbreviation abstract} / Andrew Chakane 2018