EVOLVING THE CAMEL. igg 



throwing the main weight of the body on the padded cushion un- 

 derneath the instep. 



On the other hand, in the horse, adapted as he is by nature for 

 scouring open, grassy plains or hill-sides, natural selection has 

 favored the development of a particularly hard and solid hoof, 

 whose native qualities man still further exaggerates by shoeing 

 him with a clanking ring of iron ; while in the camel, the direct 

 product of desert conditions, a singular softness and pliability of 

 foot has rather been encouraged by the soft and shifting nature 

 of Saharan or Bactrian sands. For this reason, it is found prac- 

 tically that the horse and the camel are in any given country 

 mutually exclusive ; where the one thrives the other languishes. 

 Here, in northern Africa, outside the Atlas, camels can not be 

 profitably employed as beasts of burden ; the few that come here 

 in caravans from the desert arrive with a weary, foot-sore, dejected 

 look, tired of tramping with their soft-padded feet over the hard 

 and smooth macadamized roads which the French engineers have 

 substituted for the narrow, paved Moorish packways, where mules 

 and Arabs once transacted in their slow and lumbering fashion 

 all the business of Algeria and Tunis. But beyond the shallow 

 belt between the mountains and the sea the horse is of no avail : 

 his hard and unyielding hoof sinks deep into the shifting sand of 

 the desert, and he struggles and shuffles in helpless despair where 

 the light dromedary, with his loose, shambling gait, his long trot, 

 and his padded sole, fitting itself accurately to the sand beneath, 

 accomplishes with ease his hundred miles a day for a week to- 

 gether. On hills or rocks the camel is nowhere, on open sandy 

 plains he can hold his own against all comers. 



It is interesting to note, indeed, how much alike in many 

 adaptive particulars, but especially in their awkward gait, their 

 tall necks, their long, shambling swing, and the powerful flanks 

 which bring it about, are the three chief inhabitants of the desert 

 or its outskirts — the camel, the giraffe, and the African ostrich. 

 In the last-named case, the likeness is all the more curious and 

 striking because one would almost have said beforehand that to 

 adapt a bird and a ruminant mammal to the same environment, 

 and to turn them out at last with many striking external resem- 

 blances of shape and gait, would be simply impossible ; and yet 

 Nature has accomplished this strange feat so perfectly that Lin- 

 naeus, struck by the singular analogy between the two creatures, 

 gave the ostrich the scientific name, which it still bears, of Struthio 

 camelus. Even the reduction in the number of the toes to two, 

 and their provision with a soft pad underneath, have been accu- 

 rately reproduced in the great bird. As to the giraffe, its old 

 name of camelopard sufficiently attests the popular appreciation 

 of its outer similitude to the ship of the desert. The fact is, no 



