52 VIEWS OF NATURE. 



is 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 com- 

 plete annihilation and for the maintenance of its national ex- 

 istence 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 distri- 

 bution 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 

 Aj-abs. 



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-yn-ive7i-kien-lo % , 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. Cuvierf 

 alone doubts the present existence of wild camels in the inte- 

 rior of Asia. He believes that they have merely " become 

 wild;" since Calmucks, and others professing kindred Bud- 



* Historia Regionum Occidentalium, quce Si-yu vocantur, visu et 

 audi tu cognitarum. 



f Btgne animal, t. i. p. 257. 



