452 GEORGE PERKINS MARSH. 



In a work of this nature mere diction is, of course, a secondary matter ; 

 yet the reader occasionally meets with some concise sentence which 

 reveals remarkable epigrammatic force, and a passage here and there 

 full of poetic beauty. 



And if the reader would know liow a man occupied in the varied 

 labors of a life like Mr. Marsh's could find the time or the v/ill to pro- 

 duce a work like this, he will find his answer in the author's admirable 

 disquisition, on pages 11-14 of this book, upon the duty and profit of 

 learning to see. " Sight," says he, "is a faculty; seeing, an art. To 

 the natural philosopher, the descriptive poet, the painter, the sculptor, 

 and indeed every earnest observer, the power most important to culti- 

 vate, and at tlie same time hardest to acquire, is that of seeing what is 

 before him." This power Mr. Marsh had acquired to a high degree, 

 and had so well used it to fill his memory with an infinite variety of 

 useful facts that their expression, when digested in the alembic of his 

 judicious mind, must have been to him as much a delight and a neces- 

 sity as to another it would have been a labor and a weariness ; for from 

 the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. 



The monograph on the Camel belongs to the period in which Mr. 

 Marsh was Minister of the United States at Constantinople. "The 

 practicabiUty and expediency of introducing the camel into the United 

 States " had engaged his attention " as a problem of much economical 

 interest," even before he went to Turkey. In that country he was 

 able to investigate the subject yet more fully. He also turned to good 

 account several months of travel in Egypt, Nubia, Arabia Petrtea, and 

 Syria, and he likewise saw the camel at work in Constantinople and 

 at different points in Asia Minor. Besides these personal observations, 

 he gathered such information as he could by inquiry and correspondence, 

 and by consulting the books of travel and natural history to which he 

 had access. " By these means," he says in his Preface, " I arrived at 

 a strong persuasion of the probable success of a judiciously conducted 

 attempt to naturalize in the New World this oldest of domestic quad- 

 rupeds, and at the same time I collected most of the materials which 

 compose the following pages." After his return to America he added 

 to his previous sources of information the valuable treatises of Hitter, 

 Carbuccia, and others. 



Before Mr. Marsh's treatise was printed, he had delivered a lecture 

 covering some of the same ground before the Smithsonian Institution, 

 which incorporated it in one of its Reports. The occasion for publish- 

 ing the book appears to have been given by the discussions in Congress 

 on the question of '' importing camels for army transportation and for 



