| OCR Text |
Show 72 STEPPES AND DESERTS. belong, owes doubtless to the use of the camel throughout the Lybian Desert and its Oases, not only the advantages of intercommunication, but also the preservation of its national existence to the present day. On the other hand, the negro races never, of their own accord, made any use of the camel j it was only in company with the conquering expeditions and proselyting missions of the Bedouins, carrying their prophet's doctrines over the whole of Northern Africa, that the useful animal of the Nedjid, of the Nabatheans, and of all the countries inhabited by Aramean races, spread to the westward, and was introduced among the black population. The Goths took camels as early as the fourth century to the Lower Istros (the Danube), and the Ghaznevides conveyed them in much larger numbers as far as India and the banks of the Ganges." We must distinguish two epochs in the diffusion of the camel throughout the northern part of the African continent; one under the Ptolemies, operating through Cyrene on the whole of the north-west of Africaj and the Mohammedan epoch of the conquering Arabs. It lias long been a question, whether those domestic animals which have been the earliest companions of mankind-oxen, sheep, dogs, and camels-are still to be met with in a state of original wildness. The Hiongnu, in Eastern Asia, belong to the nations who earliest tamed and trained wild camels as domestic animals. The compiler of the great Chinese work, Si-yu-wen.kien-lo, (Historia Regionum occidentalium, qure Si-yu vocantur, visu et auditu cognitarum,) affirms that, in the middle of the 18th century, wild camels, as well as wild horses and wild asses, still wandered in East Turkestan. Hadji Chalfa, in his Turkish Geography, written in the 17th century, speaks of the frequent chase of the wild camel in the high plains of Kashgar, Turfan, and Khotan. Schott translates, from a Chinese author, Ma-dschi, that wild camels are to be found in the countries to the north of China and west of. the Hoang-ho, in Ho.si or Tangut. Cuvier alone (Regne Animal, t. i. p. 257) doubts the present existence of wild camels in the interior of Asia. He believes they have merely "become wild t because Calmucks, and others having Buddhistic religious affinities with them, set camels and other animals at liberty, in order "to acquire to themselves merit for the other world." According to Greek witnesses of the times of Ar- |
