120 LEAVES EROi\r THE 



this assertion. But upon looking to the source— and, as 

 Dr. Johnson said of conversation, it is of primary con- 

 sequence in appreciating information to ascertain whether 

 it comes from a spring or a reservoir — we find that Dr. 

 Patrick Russell, the writer on whom Sir Everard de- 

 pended for this contradiction of a generally received 

 notion, states, in the appendix to his brother's History 

 of A leppo, that water, in cases of distress, is taken from 

 the camel's stomach, and that it is a fact neither doubted 

 in Syria nor considered strange. The doctor confesses 

 that he never was himself in a caravan reduced to such 

 an expedient, but he adds, that he has no reason to dis- 

 trust the report of others, particularly of the Arabs ; and 

 he refers to the historian Beidawi, who, in relating the 

 Prophet's expedition to Tabuc against the Greeks, ob- 

 serves that, among other miseries of the army, the belli- 

 gerents were reduced to the extremity of slaying their 

 camels to quench their thirst with the water contained in 

 those animated water-skins. But further, the doctor 

 records that on his return from the East Indies, in 1 789, 

 having heard accidentally that his friend Mr. John 

 Hunter had dissected a camel, and was supposed to have 

 expressed an opinion that the animal's power of preserv- 

 ing water in its stomach was rather improbable, he took 

 an opportunity of conversing with that illustrious phy- 

 siologist on the subject, when, he says, to the best of his 

 recollection, John Hunter told him that he by no means 

 drew any such absolute inference from his dissection ; 

 that he saw no reason for assignmg more than four 

 stomachs to the camel, though he "tould conceive that 

 water might be found in the paunch little impregnated 

 with the dry provender of the desert, and readily separat- 

 ing or draining from it. The doctor then goes into 

 anatomical detail, and those who wish to follow him have 

 only to go to the Museum of the College of Surgeons of 

 London — the great John Hunter's great monument — 



