6 Some conjectures on the progress of [Jan. 



" If such communications existed between the two nations, how 

 comes it that the camel, the national type-animal of Arabia, should 

 never have found his way, into the painted records of the Egyptians, 

 that careful and observant people ? It is a most singular fact, that 

 the camel never has yet been found pourtrayed upon any of the paint- 

 ings or sculptures, extant in the Nile valley.* The native habitat of 

 the horse was in high latitudes, thousands of miles distant from the 

 spot in which he most appears to have been cultured : the indigenous 

 site of the camel was in the sandy wastes of the children of Ishmael, 

 immediately adjoining the land of Egypt. Yet are its inhabitants sup- 

 posed to have transmitted the equine animal to the masters of the 

 camel, and with all their curiosity, science and observation to have 

 asked for, or admitted of, no return in kind ? We can only conclude 

 that the horse was brought by the original colonists of the Nile valley, 

 a race so singularly coincident in customs and practices with the 

 Hindus, from Central Asia, at a period beyond our power to calculate 

 upon any date now in our possession ; that another tribe or race must, 

 about the same time, have carried the same animal into Arabia, where 

 the nature of the country suggested, as in the case of Egypt, the 

 manner of his use, and the purposes to which he should be applied. 

 The one people, amid wide and open plains, and scanty pastures, rode, 

 as became a nomad race ; the other, in a low, narrow, deep, and 

 plenteous land, pampered their steeds in stables, and yoked them to a 

 car, a vehicle so light that two powerful horses could easily drag them- 

 selves and it, through the fat loan of the muddy country in which 

 a mounted man would sink to his horse's locks at every stride." 



It was not till about two years or more after the above was written 

 that I received, in the German, the three first books of Chevalier 

 Bunsen's Egypt's Place in the World's History ; and it may be judged 

 with what satisfaction I read the peroration of his first book, in which 

 he italicises the one great result of his unparalleled research, coincident 

 with my own humble inference. 



"Ona comparative view, we can have no hesitation in saying, that 

 the investigation into mythology, as far as it has gone, determines upon 

 a fact not less important as respects the world's history, as certainly 



* Gibbon (Misc. Works) quotes Diodorus Siculus 6. III. c. 44 to prove that 

 the camel was extant in his day as a wild animal in Arabia. — H. T. 



