H THOSE OTHER ANIMATES. 



for some days. Probably the camel did not foresee that, 

 while thus little by little perfecting itself for a life in the 

 desert, it was constructing an animal that would be ex- 

 ceedingly useful to man, and was preparing for itself and 

 its descendants a lifelong servitude ; but so it has been. 

 The camel was one of the very first animals that man turned 

 to his use. Jacob possessed camels, and Joseph was carried 

 away into Egypt by a caravan of Ishmaelites with laden 

 camels. Job possessed three thousand camels at the 

 beginning of his misfortunes, and was promised six thousand 

 at the end. The camel has, in fact, from the first been 

 made a servant by man ; it is only in Central Asia that it 

 is known to exist in a wild state, and it is far more probable 

 that these wild camels are the descendants of some escaped 

 from captivity, than that they should all along have retained 

 their freedom. 



The camel is capable of great and prolonged endurance 

 if not overloaded or overdriven ; but it is a mistake to sup- 

 pose that there are no limits to its powers in this way. The 

 authorities of the Nile Expedition fell into this error, with 

 the result that in three weeks after its start from Korti, the 

 four thousand camels collected and brought up at so great 

 an expense were all practically hors-de-combat, more than half 

 being dead and the rest reduced to the last stage of misery 

 and weakness. The camel on this occasion showed its usual 

 obstinacy, and insisted on dying as a protest against being 

 obliged to travel night and day with utterly insufficient 

 quantities of food and water. A similar result followed 

 the confidence of the authorities of the Abyssinian Expe- 

 dition in the power of the camel to exist without water 

 when dumped down by thousands on the bare sands of 



