22 THE CAMEL. 



navigated the pathless sand-oceans of the Sahara, 

 and of Gobi, and thus not only extended the 

 humanizing influences of commerce and civiliza- 

 tion alike over the naked and barbarous African 

 and the fur-clad Siberian savage, but, by dis- 

 covering the hidden wells of the waste and the 

 islands of verdure that surround them, has made 

 permanently habitable vast regions not otherwise 

 even penetrable by man. The howling wilder- 

 ness now harbors and nourishes numerous tribes 

 in more or less advanced stages of culture ; and 

 the services of that quadruped, on which Re- 

 bekah journeyed to meet her spouse, and which, 

 though neglected and despised by the polished 

 Egyptian, constituted a principal item in the rural 

 wealth of the father of Joseph, are as indispensa- 



familiar as he was with the camel long before he became ac- 

 quainted with shipping, would much more probably have 

 reversed the figure and called the ship, the camel of 

 the sea. 



But Hammer-Purgstall, in his most learned essay, Das 

 Kamel, in the Denkschriflen der Kaiserlichen Akademie der 

 Wissenschaften, vi. 70, observes : " The figurative name, 

 the Ship of the Desert, is known, but not the opposite met- 

 onymy, by which the ship is represented as the camel of the 

 wide ocean waste ; so too camels are called the clouds of the 

 desert, and clouds, the camels of the sky." We may therefore 

 conclude, that Wilkinson's objection to a figure of speech, 

 which has been long current in all the languages of Europe, 

 is without any just foundation. 



