106 LEAVES EROM THE 



camel, from the spongy nature of his feet. Whatever be the 

 nature of the ground — sand, or rock, or turf, or paved stones — 

 you hear no foot-fall; you see an immense animal approaching 

 you stilly as a cloud floating on air, and unless he wear a bell, 

 your sense of hearing, acute as it may be, will give you no inti- 

 mation of his presence. 



Riley, too, notices the silent passage of a train of camels 

 up a rocky steep, and accounts for the silence because 

 their feet are as soft as sponge or leather. The structure 

 of his stomach enables the camel to digest the coarsest 

 vegetable tissues, and he even prefers such plants as a 

 horse would not touch to the finest pasture. He is satis- 

 fied with very little, and if he should be stinted even of 

 this hard fare, the fat hump contains a store of nourish- 

 ment to be taken up into the system, and sustain it till 

 he reaches some oasis of tough prickly bushes, which he 

 discusses with the greatest relish ; and if the best of 

 liquids be there, fills the water-tanks with which his in- 

 terior is fitted up, and goes on his way rejoicing. 



One word more — without trespassing upon the pro- 

 vince of the anatomist or the patience of the . general 

 reader — as to the modification which even the hardest 

 parts of the animal frame will undergo to answer the 

 exiofencies of the demand. Dr. Adam found that the 

 burdens of the baggage-camel from Bengal, which he ex- 

 amined, and which — poor, indefatigable workman — had 

 done its duty more scrupulously than many of the biped 

 labourers in the vineyard of this world, had much altered 

 the form of the dorsal vertebrae. He observed that the 

 natural breadth of the bodies of those vertebrae seemed to 

 be not greater than the wideness of the nostrils ; but, 

 owing to the great weights borne by the patient animal 

 whose remains came under the doctor's observation, the 

 enlargement was such that those bones presented an in- 

 stance of exostosis rather than of normal proportion — 

 though still that enlargement had been controlled by the 

 laws of sjmametry. The greatest breadth was attained at 



