THE CAMEL OF ARABIA. 515 



forming a considerable portion of his wealth. One of the plagues that 

 fell upon Egypt (Exod. ix, 3) destroyed the camels with the other cattle. 

 Job had three thousand, and afterwaixl six thousand camels ; and the 

 Amalekites possessed "camels without number, as the sand by the sea- 

 shore for multitude" (Judges vii, 12), and the Reubenites took from the 

 Hagarites fifty thousand camels. By the Mosaic law the Camel may 

 not be eaten ; but its milk was probably used by the Jews, for the 

 Hebrews had no such aversion to this one of the " prohibited animals," 

 as they always evince toward the hog. They used it as a beast of 

 draught, for Isaiah ich. xxi, v. 7) speaks of a " chariot of camels," but 

 naturally its chief use was as a beast of burden. 



The Camel is essentially a desert animal, and attains his highest 

 development in the driest and hottest regions. In Egypt, where food is 

 plentiful, he loses his most precious qualities : near the Equator, where 

 the vegetable world approximates in character to that of South America 

 or Southern Asia, he no longer can live. Up to the twelfth degree of 

 latitude he flourishes ; a couple of degrees further, he dies without any 

 explicable cause. The reason seems to be, that the Camel can thrive in 

 dry heat, but dies in moist heat. Some attempts to domesticate the 

 Camel in Europe have been made. In 1622, Ferdinand de Medici intro- 

 duced some into Tuscany, and at San Rossore, near Pisa, the camels live 

 on a wide sandy plain as happy as in their original home ; they num- 

 bered in 1840 one hundred and seventy-one. In Southern Spain the 

 Camel has been found to succeed admirably. In 1858 camels were em- 

 ployed in Texas and Arizona. But the greatest success has attended the 

 introduction of them into Australia. 



In the North and East of Africa camels are kept in vast numbers. 

 Many Arab tribes have them by thousands and hundreds of thousands. 

 Before the railroad from Cairo to Suez was open, at least six hundred 

 camels a day were emplo3'ed in conducting the service between those 

 places. Still greater is the number of camels employed in the great 

 caravans between the North of Africa and the negro countries. The 

 tribe of Tibbo have two hundred thousand of them, the Berbers possess 

 more than a million. In Arabia, the province of Nedjed is the most 

 famous for them, and it supplies Syria, Hedjaz, and Yemen with them, 

 beside sending thousands to Asia Minor. The number of camels that 

 perish yearly in the passage of the desert cannot be counted, but travel- 

 ers tell that the tracks of the caravans are for miles lined with their 



