Old males frequently have the hair very ragged and scant, especially on hind-quarters, and on their knees are great callosities. The truly wild camels of the marisma are fast disappearing. A friend has furnished me with the approximate number now remaining absolutely wild, viz. fifteen or sixteen near La Macha fronting the Palace of Tisana, besides five enclosed in the Cerrado de Matas Gordas, near the Palacio del Rey, and belonging to Madame La Condesa de Paris. It was owing to the rapid decrease in their numbers, and in order to save them from extinction, that the Condesa had these enclosures, known as Matas Gordas, prepared. They contain excellent pasturage, besides some extent of brushwood; yet the enclosed camels do not flourish, nor have they ever bred. Big as the enclosures are, yet the area may be too restricted for them; or it may be the disturbance due to the presence of cattle and herdsmen (since the cerrados are let for grazing) that explains this failure; or possibly the camels resent being enclosed at all. At any rate the spectacle of troops of camels rushing wildly forward in all directions is passing away all too quickly, and soon nothing but the legend will remain. Truly it is melancholy that the wild camels should be allowed utterly to disappear, representing, as they do, so extraordinary a fact in zoological science. Our friend Mr. William Garvey tells us that in the summer of 1907, while returning from Villamanrique, crossing the dry marisma in his automobile, he saw three camels. He drove towards them, and when at 500 or 600 yards, they turned and fled, he put on full speed (sixty miles an hour), and within some ten minutes had all three camels completely beaten, tongues hanging out, unable to go another yard! This will be the first occasion when wild camels have been run down, in an open desert, by a motor-car! _February 9, 1903._--This morning, shortly after daybreak, a big single bull camel passed my "hide" in the Lucio de las Nuevas within easy ball-shot. He was splashing through water about two feet deep overgrown with samphire bushes, and "roared" at intervals--a curious sort of ventriloquial "gurgle," followed by a bellow which I could still distinguish when he had passed quite two miles away. With the binoculars I distinguished at vast distance five other camels in the direction the single bull was taking. Here we insert a note received from the co-author's brother, J. Crawhall Chapman:--