The Semitic origin of the word ‘ass’ rightly indicates the introduction of the species into Europe from Semitic Western Asia. As to the date of its arrival, all that can be told is that it was subsequent to the beginning of the bronze epoch. The pile-dwellers of Switzerland and North Italy were unacquainted with an animal fundamentally Oriental in its habitudes. Its reluctance, for instance, to cross the smallest streamlet attests the physical tradition of a desert home; and the white ass of Bagdad represents to this day, the fullest capabilities of the race.[138] Yet neither the ass nor the camel was included in the primitive Aryan fauna. For they could not have been known, still less domesticated, without being named, and the only widespread appellations borne by them are derived from Semitic sources. Evidently the loan of the words accompanied the transmission of the species. It is very difficult, in the face of this circumstance—as Dr. Schrader has pertinently observed[139]—to locate the Aryan cradle-land anywhere to the east of the Bosphorus. Footnote 138: Houghton, _Trans. Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. v. p. 49. Footnote 139: _Thier- und Pflanzen-Geographie_, p. 17. Dr. Virchow was struck, on his visit to the Troad, in 1879, with the similarity of the actual condition of the country to that described in the Iliad.[140] The inhabitants seem, in fact, during the long interval, to have halted in a transition-stage between pastoral and agricultural life, by far the larger proportion of the land supplying pasturage for ubiquitous multitudes of sheep, oxen, goats, horses, and asses. The sheep, however, belong to a variety assuredly of post-Homeric introduction, since the massive tails hampering their movements could not well have escaped characterisation in some emphatic Homeric epithet. Footnote 140: _Beiträge zur Landeskunde der Troas_; Berlin. _Abhandlungen_, 1879, p. 59.