I 



EVOLVING TEE CAMEL. 195 



types still hold out in extreme recesses or under special climatic 

 and geographical conditions ; and thus the llama and alpaca have 

 been preserved to our time intact in the narrow belt of temperate 

 slope between the snow-clad Andes and the Pacific shore. 



I have said that the cameloids are a very ancient type of rumi- 

 nants indeed : their skeleton abundantly proves this fact ; but I 

 will not dwell at length upon such dry points of anatomical de- 

 tail, because I fancy I have noticed on various occasions that the 

 general public does not wildly interest itself in questions of carpal 

 and metatarsal bones. It is not frantically enthusiastic about 

 distinctions of odd-toed or even-toed ungulates. What most of 

 us really want to know, and what the comparative anatomists as 

 a body still studiously neglect to tell us in plain language, is how 

 each animal came to obtain, not its bones which we don't see, but 

 its distinctive external shape and characteristics — its horns, its 

 tusks, its hump, or its antlers. We would rather learn a few 

 simple facts about the evolution of the elephant's trunk or the 

 peacock's tail than a whole volume of learned memoirs on the 

 cervical vertebrae and the carinate sternum. Those things are 

 doubtless very convincing in their own way, but they are not of a 

 sort to rouse our profound personal attention. There are, how- 

 ever, two other visible points about the camel-kind which clearly 

 mark their true position as very early ruminants indeed, and 

 which can yet be readily apprehended by the ordinary surface- 

 loving, non-anatomical intelligence. One is, that the camels as a 

 group antedate the development of horns or antlers ; the other is 

 that they still possess in full, like other animals, those canine and 

 incisor teeth which are partly obsolete, partly altered in shape, in 

 all the higher and later ruminants. Each of these peculiarities 

 has a meaning of its own, and points back to certain interesting 

 episodes in the development of the great ruminant order. 



The vast mass of ruminants generally at the present day pos- 

 sess some form or other of horns or their equivalents. In the 

 giraffe, which in a few points (mostly delusive) approaches the 

 camels, the horns are merely blunt protuberances of bone, per- 

 sistent through life, and covered with a continuous hairy skin. 

 They show us the lowest surviving stage in the evolution of 

 frontal weapons. In the deer tribe, they appear at first under 

 much the same form, as little knobs or bosses of bone on the 

 forehead, underlying a fold of skin technically known as the vel- 

 vet ; but when the horns are fully grown, the velvet is rubbed off, 

 and the bone alone shows its naked material as the branching 

 antlers with which we are all so familiar in the Scotch red deer. 

 Horns of this type are shed annually, and reproduced in more 

 and more complex forms (representing successive ancestral stages) 

 with each renewal. Finally, in the great central group of the 



