Note 9 — STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 4.—“The Ship of the Desert.”

In oriental poems, the camel is called the land-ship, or the ship of the Desert (Sefynet-el-badyet); Chardin, Voyages, nouv. éd. par Langlès, 1811, T. iii. p. 376.

But the camel is not merely the carrier of the desert, and the link which, rendering communication between different countries possible, connects them with each other: he is also, as Carl Ritter has shewn in his excellent memoir on the sphere of diffusion of these animals, the principal and essential condition of the nomadic life of nations in the patriarchal stage of national development, in the hot parts of our planet where rain is either altogether wanting or very infrequent. No animal’s life is so closely associated by natural bonds with a particular stage of the developement of the life of man,—a connection historically established for several thousand years,—as the life of the camel among the Bedouin tribes (Asien, Bd. viii. Abth. i. 1847, S. 610 und 758). “The camel was entirely unknown to the cultivated Carthaginian nation through all the centuries of their flourishing existence, until the destruction of their city. The Marusians first brought it into military use, in the train of armies, in Western Lybia, in the times of the Cæsars; perhaps in consequence of its employment in commercial operations in the valley of the Nile by the Ptolemies. The Guanches, the inhabitants of the Canary Islands and probably related to the Berber race, were not acquainted with the camel before the 15th century, when it was introduced by Norman conquerors and settlers. In the probably very limited communication of the Guanches with the Coast of Africa, the small size of the boats would prevent the transport of large animals. The true Berber race, diffused throughout the interior of Northern Africa, and to which the Tibbos and Tuaricks, as already mentioned, belong, owes doubtless to the use of the camel throughout the Lybian desert and its Oases, not only the advantages of intercommunication, but also the preservation of its national existence to the present day. On the other hand, the negro races never, of their own accord, made any use of the camel; it was only in company with the conquering expeditions and proselyting missions of the Bedouins, carrying their prophet’s doctrines over the whole of Northern Africa, that the useful animal of the Nedjid, of the Nabatheans, and of all the countries inhabited by Aramean races, spread to the westward and was introduced among the black population. The Goths took camels as early as the fourth century to the Lower Istros (the Danube), and the Ghaznevides conveyed them in much larger numbers as far as India and the banks of the Ganges.” We must distinguish two epochs in the diffusion of the camel throughout the northern part of the African continent; one under the Ptolemies, operating through Cyrene on the whole of the north-west of Africa; and the Mohammedan epoch of the conquering Arabs.

It has long been a question, whether those domestic animals which have been the earliest companions of mankind—oxen, sheep, dogs, and camels—are still to be met with in a state of original wildness. The Hiongnu, in Eastern Asia, belong to the nations who earliest tamed and trained wild camels as domestic animals. The compiler of the great Chinese work, Si-yu-wen-kien-lo, (Historia Regionum occidentalium, quæ Si-yu vocantur, visu et auditu cognitarum,) affirms that in the middle of the 18th century wild camels, as well as wild horses and wild asses, still wandered in East Turkestan. Hadji Chalfa, in his Turkish Geography, written in the 17th century, speaks of the frequent chase of the wild camel in the high plains of Kashgar, Turfan, and Khotan. Schott translates, from a Chinese author, Ma-dschi, that wild camels are to be found in the countries to the north of China and west of the Hoang-ho, in Ho-si or Tangut. Cuvier alone (Règne Animal, T. i. p. 257), doubts the present existence of wild camels in the interior of Asia. He believes they have merely “become wild;” because Calmucks, and others having Buddhistic religious affinities with them, set camels and other animals at liberty, in order “to acquire to themselves merit for the other world.” According to Greek witnesses of the times of Artemidorus and Agatharchides of Cnidus, the Ailanitic Gulf of the Nabatheans was the home of the wild Arabian camel. (Ritter’s Asien, Bd. viii. s. 670, 672, and 746.) The discovery of fossil camel bones of the ancient world by Captain Cautley and Doctor Falconer, in 1834, in the sub-Himalaya range of the Sewalik hills, is peculiarly deserving of notice. These bones were found with other ancient bones of mastodons, of true elephants, of giraffes, and of a gigantic land tortoise (Colossochelys), twelve feet in length and six feet in height. (Humboldt, Cosmos, Engl. ed. vol. i. p. 268.) This camel of the Ancient World has received the name of Camelus sivalensis, but does not show any considerable difference from the still living Egyptian and Bactrian camels with one and two humps. Forty camels have very recently been introduced into Java, having been brought there from Teneriffe. (Singapore Journal of the Indian Archipelago, 1847, p. 206.) The first experiment has been made in Samarang. In like manner, reindeer have only been introduced into Iceland from Norway in the course of the last century. They were not found there when the island was settled, notwithstanding the proximity to East Greenland, and the existence of floating masses of ice. (Sartorius von Waltershausen physisch-geographische Skizze von Island, 1847, S. 41.)