88 ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 
ginians until after the downfall of their commonwealth; and 
that his first appearance in Western Africa is more recent still. 
The Bactrian camel was certainly brought from Asia Minor to 
the Northern shores of the Black Sea, by the Goths, in the third 
or fourth century, and the buffalo first appeared in Italy about 
A.D. 600, though it is unknown whence or by whom he was 
introduced.* The Arabian single-humped camel, or dromedary, 
has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially introduced 
into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented 
upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by 
the American Government into Texas and New Mexico, where 
it finds the climate and the vegetable products best suited to its 
wants, and promises to become a very useful agent in the pro- 
motion of the special civilization for which those regions are 
adapted. 
Quadrupeds, both domestic and wild, bear the privations 
and discomforts of long voyages better than would be sup- 
posed. The elephant, the giratfe, the rhinoceros, and even the 
hippopotamus, do not seem to suffer much at sea. Some of the 
camels imported by the U. 8. government into Texas from the 
Crimea and Northern Africa were a whole year on shipboard. 
On the other hand, George Sand, in Un [Hiver au Midi, gives 
an amusing description of the sea-sickness of swine in the short 
passage from the Baleares to Barcelona. 
America had no domestic quadruped but a species of dog, the 
lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or buffalo.t Of 
a horseman yet found in the Egyptian tombs is on the blade of a battle axe 
of uncertain origin and period. 
* Irdkunde, viii., Asien, 1ste Abtheilung, pp. 660, 758. Heun, Kuttenpflanzen, 
p. 345, 
| See Chapter III, post; also HumBoupr, Ansichten der Natur, i., p. 71. 
From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or auerochs, found 
among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, and 
from other circumstances, it is inferred that this animal had been domesti- 
cated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in 
Le Alpi che cingono U Italia, that it had been tamed by the Veneti also. See 
LYELL, Antiquity of Man, pp. 24, 25, and the last-named work, p. 489. This 
is a fact of much interest, because it is one of the very few historically known 
