ANIMALS AND SUCCULENT HERBAGE. 405 



That by no means follows as long as the camel 

 can obtain succulent twigs of bushes or grasses, or 

 other nutritious food, water is no longer a necessity. 



The examples of the sheep, the rabbit, and the stall-fed 

 ox, which we have already cited, are conclusive in this 

 respect ; the two former, as we know, do not as a rule 

 require to drink, when pasturing upon our English mea- 

 dows, where succulent herbage, dews, and copious showers 

 are plentiful. But in dry hot countries, like South 

 Africa or Australia, sheep require to be regularly 

 watered. So also with the stall-fed ox, if fed on turnips 

 and hay he does not require water, but if he gets hay 

 only he must have water morning and evening. Now 

 in almost all deserts there is a season of life and 

 verdure, however short, provided that there is rain; 

 and it is doubtless by camels when out at grass, at this 

 season, not requiring to be taken to water, that these 

 reports as to the extraordinary time camels can exist 

 without it have arisen. 



The watering-places in the deserts of the old world 

 are some of them of very great antiquity. The 

 identical wells, and even the patterns of the water ves- 

 sels having been handed down unchanged from genera- 

 tion to generation, in the exact form in which they 

 were used, ages ago, by the predecessors of the pre- 

 sent race of Arabs. Customs in these regions are as 

 changeless as the aspect of the desert itself, and the 

 habits and mode of life of the nomadic tribes who 

 find a home in these desolate wastes, are probably pre- 

 cisely what they were thousands of years ago. * 



Some of the finer and deeper wells of course contain 



* See Sir Samuel Baker's Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, 1867, p. I2Q. 



