2 THE CAMEL 



hand, they have been able to indicate with tolerable 

 accuracy and certainty the progenitors of all other 

 domestic quadrupeds. 

 Fossil Fossil remains have been discovered in the Sewalik 



camels 



Hills, in India, deposited in the Tertiary strata, and of 

 a species slightly larger, but otherwise hardly dis- 

 tinguishable from recent specimens. Andrew Murray, 

 writing on this subject, says, ' The difference is so slight 

 it pleases us to think that we have here in this most 

 ancient animal a species which saw the Miocene epoch, 

 and which has survived all the chances and changes 

 which have taken place since then,' and there is much 

 soundness and a great deal of common-sense in his 

 remark. Excavations have also been made in Algeria, 

 and large fossil remains have been found in the 

 Quaternary deposits. Professor Cope has traced a long 

 line of descent from the Miocene Poebrotherium to the 

 modern forms, and Marsh and others have described 

 primitive forms from the Eocene strata. It is a curious 

 fact that the former description of the family seems to 

 be much wider than the natural habitat of the forms 

 now extant a fact which may, perhaps, be attributed to 

 the Deluge, and the sundering of what in those days 

 were vast globes into smaller and insulated continents. f 

 That the camel was in use in Assyria long ages ago is 

 evidenced by the fact that traces of it appear in the 

 Assyrian sculptures, while the fossil remains of the 

 Helladotherium, which were discovered at Pikermi, near 

 Athens, in 1853, and commonly supposed to be those of 

 the giraffe, are nothing else, my friend Mr. Wessels 

 thinks, after a careful comparison of the engravings of 

 the skeletons of each, than those of the camel. The 



