NATURAL HISTORY OP ARABIA. 



trouble. They are content with the scantiest fare, a 

 bunch of dry grass or the stunted shrubs of the desert. 

 Their ordinary food is a ball of paste (maabouk} weighing 

 about a pound, made of barley-meal and water, which each 

 receives in the evening ; and this is all the daily expense of 

 these useful creatures. The value of the camel depends 

 of course on its kind and quality. In Hejaz, Burckhardt 

 states that the price of a good one was sixty dollars or 

 14; but they sometimes cost 150, or 35; and Saoud 

 has been known to pay as much as 300, or 70, for one 

 of the Oman breed. They are subject to various defects 

 and diseases which very much affect their value ; such 

 as stiffness of the neck, tremor and swellings in the hind- 

 legs, pustules about the mouth, ulceration below the chest, 

 and colic and diarrhoea, which generally prove fatal. 

 To most of these distempers the Arabs apply cautery, 

 as well as to the wounds or injuries which are often 

 occasioned by bad pack-saddles, or burdens of too great 

 a weight. No pain, however, provokes the generous ani- 

 mal to refuse the load or throw it on the ground. Over- 

 come with hunger and fatigue it spends its latest breath 

 in its master's service, and leaves its bones to whiten and 

 rot in the desert. 



Dromedary. This animal was considered by the an- 

 cients as a distinct species of the camel. Diodorus and 

 Strabo gave it the appellation of dromos or the runner, 

 to distinguish it from the Bacht or Bactrian camel, which 

 was reckoned best adapted for carrying burdens. It is, 

 however, rather a variety of the same species, and is 

 found sometimes with a single and sometimes with a 

 double hump. It breeds readily with the common camel. 

 The Anatolian or Turkoman race are produced between 

 an Arab she-camel and the double-humped dromedary 

 from the Crimea. A dromedary and a she Turkoman 

 produce a small handsome camel (called taous}, which 

 has a very thick growth of long hair under the neck 

 reaching almost to the ground ; and two humps, one of 

 which the natives cut off to render it more fit for bearing 

 a load. The Arabs have none with a double hump ; nor 

 did Burckhardt meet with any of them in Syria ; and 

 the only one seen by Niebuhr was in a town in Anatolia, 

 to which it had been brought from the Crimea. "It 

 differs," says Henniker, " in its make, its uses, and its 

 master, only as a hunter differs from a pack-horse." 





