Note 9 — ON STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 3—“The ship of the desert.”

In the poetry of the East, the camel is designated as the land-ship, or the ship of the desert (Sefynet-el-badyet^[AT]).

The camel is, however, not only the carrier in the desert, and the medium for maintaining communication between different countries, but is also, as Carl Bitter has shown in his admirable treatise on the sphere of distribution of this animal, “the main requirement of a nomadic mode of life in the patriarchal stage of national development, in the torrid regions of our planet, where rain is either wholly or in a great degree absent. No animal’s life is so closely associated by natural bonds with a certain primitive stage of the development of the life of man, as that of the camel among the Bedouin tribes, nor has any other been established in like manner by a continuous historical evidence of several thousand years.”^[AU] “The camel was entirely unknown to the cultivated people of Carthage through all the centuries of their flourishing existence, until the destruction of the city. It was first brought into use for armies by the Marusians, in Western Lybia, in the times of the Cæsars; perhaps in consequence of its employment in commercial undertakings by the Ptolemies, in the valley of the Nile. The Guanches, inhabiting the Canary Islands, who were probably related to the Berber race, were not acquainted with the camel before the fifteenth 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 smallness of their boats must necessarily have impeded the transport of large animals. The true Berber race, which was diffused throughout the interior of Northern Africa, and to which the Tibbos and Tuaryks, as already observed, belong, 52is probably indebted to the use of the camel throughout the Lybian desert and its oases, not only for the advantages of internal communication, but also for its escape from complete annihilation and for the maintenance of its national existence to the present day. The use of the camel continued, on the other hand, to be unknown to the negro races, and it was only in company with the conquering expeditions and proselyting missions of the Bedouins through the whole of Northern Africa, that the useful animal of the Nedschd, of the Nabatheans, and of all the districts occupied by Aramean races, spread here, as elsewhere, to the westward. The Goths brought camels as early as the fourth century to the Lower Istros (the Danube), and the Ghaznevides transported them in much larger numbers to India as far as the banks of the Ganges.” We must distinguish two epochs in the distribution of the camel throughout the northern part of the African continent; the first under the Ptolemies, which operated through Cyrene on the whole of the north-west of Africa, and the second under the Mahommedan epoch of the conquering Arabs.

It has long been a matter of discussion, whether those domestic animals which were the earliest companions of mankind, as oxen, sheep, dogs, and camels, are still to be met with in a state of original wildness. The Hiongnu, in Eastern Asia, are among the nations who earliest trained wild camels as domestic animals. The compiler of the great Chinese work, Si-yu-wen-kien-lo^[AV], states that in the middle of the eighteenth century, wild camels, as well as wild horses and wild asses, still roamed over Eastern Turkestan. Hadji Chalfa, in his Turkish Geography, written in the seventeenth century, speaks of the very frequent hunting of the wild camel in the high plains of Kashgar, Turfan, and Khotan. Schott finds in the writings of a Chinese author, Ma-dschi, that wild camels exist in the countries north of China and west of the basin of the Hoang-ho, in Ho-si or Tangut. Cuvier^[AW] alone doubts the present existence of wild camels in the interior of Asia. He believes that they have merely “become wild;” since Calmucks, and others professing kindred Buddhist 53doctrines, set camels and other animals at liberty, in order “to acquire to themselves merit for the other world.” The Ailanitic Gulf of the Nabatheans was the home of the wild Arabian camel, according to Greek witnesses of the times of Artemidorus and Agatharchides of Cnidus.^[AX] The discovery of fossil camel-bones of the ancient world in the Sewalik hills (which are projecting spurs of the Himalaya range), by Captain Cautley and Dr. Falconer, in 1834, is especially worthy of notice. These remains were found with antediluvian bones of mastodons, true elephants, giraffes, and a gigantic land tortoise (Colossochelys), twelve feet in length and six feet in height.^[AY] This camel of the ancient world has been named Camelus sivalensis, although it does not show any great difference from the still living Egyptian and Bactrian camels with one and two humps. Forty camels have very recently been introduced into Java, from Teneriffe^[AZ]. The first experiment has been made in Samarang. In like manner, reindeer were only introduced into Iceland from Norway in the course of the last century. They were not found there when the island was first colonised, notwithstanding its proximity to East Greenland, and the existence of floating masses of ice.^[BA]