"" HISTORY OP 



Arabia, and this, of all others, seems the most adapted to the 

 support and production of this animal. 



The camel is the most temperate of all animals, and it can 

 continue to travel several days without drinking. In those vast 

 deserts, where the earth is everywhere dry and sandy, where 

 there are neither birds nor beasts, neither insects nor vegetables, 

 where nothing is to be seen but hills of sand and heaps of stone, 

 there the camel travels, posting forward, without requiring either 

 drink or pasture, and is often found six or seven days without 

 any sustenance whatsoever. Its feet are formed for travelling 

 upon sand, and utterly unfit for moist or marshy places •, the 

 inhabitants, therefore, find a most useful assistant in this animal, 

 where no other could subsist, and by its means cross those deserts 

 with safety, which would be unpassable by any other method of 

 conveyance. 



An animal, thus formed for a sandy and desert region, cannot 



!t3 callosities are merely hereditary badges of its subjection to man ; and yet 

 this opinion, monstrous as it is, has been adopted by a distinguished natura- 

 list — as we shall have occasion more particularly to notit>e. 



Tlie uses which the camel has served in the civilization of mankind, ia 

 those coiuitries of the East where civilization first commenced, have been 

 of such importance, that they would fairly enter into the scheme of a wise 

 and beneficent Providence. Unless such an animal had existed in Asia, 

 (a country intersected by immense arid plains, and impassable with burthens, 

 except by a creature possessing at once great strength and an extraordinary 

 capacity of enduring privation,) the intercourse of mankind would have 

 been confined to small spots where abmidance reigned ; the commodities of 

 one part of that immense region could not have been exchanged for those of 

 another ; commerce, the great moving principle in tlie extension of civiliza- 

 tion, would have been tmknoivn ; and knowledge would have been limited 

 to particular districts, and would tliere liave been of tlie most stunted and 

 feeble growtli— in tlie same way that a native crab-stock produces sour and 

 worthless fruit, till some slip from the tree of another climate is grafted 

 upon it. Thus, instead of tlie learning of the Hindoos and the Egyptians 

 being communicated from one region to tlie other,* and thence, spreading 

 over Greece, becoming the imperishable possession of the human race,— and 

 instead of the produce of the East being brought to the West, to induce that 

 taste for comforts and luxuries which principally developes the human in. 

 tellect,— that portion of mankind which was first civilized would probably 

 at tills day have been in the same state of ignorance as the Indians of South 

 America, whose communications are cut off by sandy deserts and inaccessi- 

 ble mountains, and who thus believe that the affairs of their mission (a set- 

 tlement of a few Imndred natives under a priest) comprise every thing that 



can be of interest to any individual of the great family of man. See Library 



of Kntertainiug Knowledge — Menageries. 



• See Frederic Schlegel's History of Literature. 



