98 NINTH ANNUAL REPORT OF 



LECTUEES 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 



No. I.— THE CAMEL 



BY HON. GEO. P. MARSH, 



The first command addressed to man by his Creator, and substan- 

 tially repeated to the second great progenitor of our race, not only 

 charged him to subdue the earth, but gave him dominion over all ter- 

 restrial creatures, whether animate or inanimate, and thus predicted 

 and prescribed the subjugation of the entire organic and inorganic world 

 to human control and human use. 



Man is yet far from having achieved the fulfihncnt of this grand mis- 

 sion. He has, indeed, surveyed the greater part of his vast domain ;: 

 marked the outhne of its solid and its fluid surface, and approximately 

 measured their areas and determined their relative elevation ; pierced 

 its superficial strata, and detected the order of their historical succes- 

 sion ; reduced to their primal elements its rocks, its soils, its waters, 

 and its atmosphere, and even soared above its canopy of cloud. He 

 has traced, tlirough the void of space, its movements of rotation, revo- 

 lution, and translation ; resolved the seeming circles of its attendant 

 satellite into strangely tortuous paths of progression ; investigated its 

 relations of density, attraction, and motion, to other visible and invisible 

 cosmical orbs: and unfolded the laws of those mysterions allied agen- 

 cies, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism, whose sphere of influence 

 seems commensurate with that of creation. But, notwithstanding these 

 triumphs, earth is not 3^et all his own ; and millions of leagues of her 

 surface still lie uninhabited, unenjoyed, and unsubdued — yielding nei- 

 ther food, nor clothing, nor shelter to man, or even to the humbler tribes 

 of animal or vegetable life, which, in other wa^^s, minister to his neces- 

 sities or his convenience. 



In like manner, man has studied the biography, and the relations ot 

 affinity or dependence, of the infinitely varied contemporaneous forms 

 of organic life; traced the history of myriads of species of both plants 

 and animals, which had ceased to be before the Creator breathed 

 into his nostrils the breath of lite; and demonstrated the past and pres- 

 ent existence of numerous tribes of organic beings, too minute to be 

 individually cognizable by any of the unaided senses, and yet largely 

 influencing our own animal ecpnomy, and even composing no unimport- 

 4int part, cf .the crust of the solid globe ; but of the vegetables that clothe 

 and dlvcrsif}'- its soil, of the a.pimated creatures that float in its atmos- 

 phere, enlive:^ its surface, or cleave its waters, but comparatively few- 

 have as yet hmn rendered in any way subservient to human use, fewer 



