EVOLVING THE CAMEL. 193 



even thougli, like the Frenchman in the same old apologue, yon 

 only go to the Jardin des Plantes for the model on which you base 

 your rhapsodical portrait. But when a man has actually been to 

 Africa itself, and seen a caravan in all its glory, headed by a real 

 live Arab in a burnous of the dirtiest, fresh from the sands and 

 siroccos of the desert — who, I should like to know, if not he, is 

 entitled to speak with authority about camels ? For here I am, 

 on the borders of the desert, upon whose flats I can look down (at 

 a safe distance) from yonder mountain-heights ; and if ever there 

 was a case of "adaptation to the environment," the camel has 

 indeed adapted himself wholly and solely to the conditions of 

 Sahara. 



Deserts, in fact, are exacting in the matter of adaptation ; you 

 must obey them or die. No other environment (not even perhaps 

 the arctic snows) demands so much in the way of adaptiveness 

 from all that live in it. The plants are every one of them saline 

 and alkaline ; they must content themselves with sand instead of 

 soil, and with brackish pools instead of fresh water. The animals 

 are all peculiar to their habitat ; bird and insect must assume alike 

 the uniform gray sabelline tint of external nature everywhere 

 around them. Only two higher types subsist at all among those 

 great sand-wastes — two types specially fitted for their own excep- 

 tional mode of life, one plant and one animal — the date-palm and 

 the camel. They make Sahara. Nobody ever saw a picture of the 

 desert without a date-palm and a camel in the foreground. Those 

 two inseparable elements of the Africa of our fancy shall not be 

 parted even in this sober biological sketch. Nature, indeed, has 

 joined them together, and science shall not be permitted here to 

 put them asunder. 



And yet, though the camel as we know him is peculiarly Saha- 

 ran, a product of the great African, Indian, and Bactrian deserts, 

 it is not to the Old World that we must look at all if we wish to 

 evolve the camel historically, rather than to develop him by a 

 priori process from the depths of our own inner consciousness. It 

 is America that gives us geologically the earliest evidence of the 

 camel's ancestors ; and it is America that still contains the greater 

 number of species of the camel family, in the persons of the llama, 

 the alpaca, the guanaco, and their allies. Prof. Cope has drawn 

 up the pedigree of the race for us in full detail. The Asiatic and 

 African camels, in fact, are mere surviving Oriental members of 

 a family American in origin and history, but stranded, as it were, 

 in a remote corner of the Old World, where they have survived the 

 competition of newer and higher types in virtue of their special 

 minor adaptations to the peculiar circumstances of their strange 

 habitat. Having early fitted themselves in certain outer points 

 to desert conditions, they have been enabled to outlive all their 



TOL, XXXIV. 13 



