202 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



existence in the Eocene period. They have no horns or tusks or 

 weapons of offense, such as grow up in the savage battles of the 

 males among dominant races ; and their very docility and gentle- 

 ness of demeanor result in the last resort from this undeveloped 

 character of their entire class ; for non-fighting animals are always 

 timid, patient, and inoffensive, though often obstinate and self- 

 willed to a noteworthy degree, as the camel can be whenever he 

 chooses. Their virtues themselves thus tell against them ; they 

 betray the stupidity and the archaic, unprogressive character of 

 the whole type. The camelidce, as a group, in short, are surviving 

 specimens of the raw material from which, by natural and sexual 

 selection, the higher ruminants, in diverging lines, have been 

 slowly evolved through innumerable ages. 



But of this antique and unspecialized type, the camel itself is 

 in certain ways a highly modified and peculiarly adapted desert 

 offshoot. Retaining still in its internal structure the marks of its 

 early undeveloped character, it nevertheless presents in external 

 configuration and functional peculiarities a remarkable instance 

 of special adaptation to a restricted environment. While as a 

 ruminant it is extremely low, as a desert animal it is at the very 

 top of the tree. And it is this early adaptation to a very unusual 

 mode of life that has enabled the camel, lowly as it is in general 

 organization and in intellectual grade, to hold its own successfully 

 against all later comers, and to preserve for us still in the great 

 central Eurasiafrican continent a type of life otherwise extinct 

 save in a single outlying and practically insulated district of the 

 old South American life-region. — Longman's Magazine. 



BELIEFS ABOUT THE SOUL. 



By E. a. OAKES. 



FROM the standpoint of primitive man it seems impossible 

 for him to escape the conviction of a plurality of souls or the 

 belief of their survival after death. Troubled by no psychical 

 problems, accepting all things with an unreasoning faith, the phe- 

 nomena of dreams, of coma attending swoons, of apoplexy, and 

 of kindred afflictions, are explicable only on the supposition of a 

 plural soul. He lies down on his rude couch, closes his eyes, and 

 in an instant is living over the scenes of his daily life. He visits 

 again far-distant hunting-grounds, renews once more the joys and 

 fatigues of the chase, indulges in his savage warfare, and en- 

 counters adventures at once weird and abnormal. The dead — 

 those who have for years been moldering in the earth — come back 

 and speak to him, and renew once more the pleasures of his social 



