XXX PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. 



/'The camel's capacity of enduring thirst is an acquired habit, 



depending upon its training, and adapts itself to the animal's adopted 

 mode of life. ' In Egypt,' says Burckhardt (Notes on the Bedouins 

 and Waliabys, 4to, 1830), ' where he drinks daily of the Nile, the 

 period of privation cannot be extended beyond a day ; on the high 

 but moist table-lands of Anatolia, it is two days ; over Arabia 

 generally, it is four days ; while in the route between Egypt and 

 Senaar, they will continue nine days without water, though they 

 suffer severely.' Burckhardt treats the often-repeated account of 

 killing the camel for the sake of the water in its stomach as a fable. 

 This animal, indeed, has not, as is generally stated, any peculiar 

 structure in the form of a sac, or fifth stomach, to enable it to 

 sustain long-continued privation of water. John Hunter, who dis- 

 sected a camel, states that he could find no more than four stomachs, 

 the usual number in ruminating animals ; and Sir E. Home, who 

 assisted at the dissection, and prepared the different stomachs for 

 exhibiting their structure (now in the Hunterian Museum), could 

 discover no separate reservoir for water. Either, then, this does 

 not exist, or it is developed in the course of education, and by the 

 creature's habitual necessities 



" The offspring of the goat and ewe possess perfect powers of re- 

 production ; the same may be observed of hybrids between the canary 

 bird and the goldfinch, chaffinch and bullfinch, yellow-hammer and 

 sparrow. The progeny in all these cases are prolific, and breed not 

 only with the parent stock, but with each other. So also the domestic 

 fowl and the pheasant, the partridge and the guinea-fowl. White, 

 of Selborne, gives us a description and figure of a bird, shot at Lord 

 Stowell's, which he considered as a hybrid between a pheasant and 

 a pea-fowl. 



" ' The following not less remarkable or interesting fact was related 

 to us by Mr. M'Nab viz., that he had sown the seeds of Ilex bale- 

 arica, from which he had produced the common holly. He had 

 also raised from the seeds of the tender Madeira holly (Ilex per ado], 

 a variety identical with that known as Hodgin's holly ; and although 

 the offspring of a tender parent, yet, like Hodgin's variety, it was 

 also quite hardy. We regard these as extremely interesting and 

 curious facts. We have here the Ilex balearica reverting back into 

 the type of the genus, the common English holly, and this, too, 

 although an exotic, and acknowledged species ; while in the case of 

 the Ilex perado, a plant scarcely deserving the name of half-hardy, 

 it produces an offspring not only wholly different and unlike itself, 

 but, what is far more remarkable, the progeny are hardy, while the 

 parent is tender.' Gardeners and Farmer's Journal, Sept. 9, 

 1848, p. 164 Article Notes on a Gardening Tour. By the Editor." 



When we consider the importance attached in predominant systems 

 to minute peculiarities of the teeth as indications of distinctness of 

 species, it becomes curious to learn the variability attaching to this 

 department of organization in the human subject, as above remarked 

 upon. It appears that, among a quantity of human remains found 



