Views of nature: or Contemplations on the sublime phenomena of creation: with scientific illustrationsHumboldt, Alexander von
Science
Views of nature: or Contemplations on the sublime phenomena of creation: with scientific illustrations
Humboldt, Alexander von
Physical geography; Plant morphology; Science; South America -- Description and travel
for the maintenance of its national existence to the present day. The
use of the camel continued, on the other hand, to be unknown to the
negro races, and it was only in company with the conquering
expeditions and proselyting missions of the Bedouins through the whole
of Northern Africa, that the useful animal of the Nedschd, of the
Nabatheans, and of all the districts occupied by Aramean races, spread
here, as elsewhere, to the westward. The Goths brought camels as early
as the fourth century to the Lower Istros (the Danube), and the
Ghaznevides transported them in much larger numbers to India as far as
the banks of the Ganges.” We must distinguish two epochs in the
distribution of the camel throughout the northern part of the African
continent; the first under the Ptolemies, which operated through
Cyrene on the whole of the north-west of Africa, and the second under
the Mahommedan epoch of the conquering Arabs.
It has long been a matter of discussion, whether those domestic
animals which were the earliest companions of mankind, as oxen, sheep,
dogs, and camels, are still to be met with in a state of original
wildness. The Hiongnu, in Eastern Asia, are among the nations who
earliest trained wild camels as domestic animals. The compiler of the
great Chinese work, _Si-yu-wen-kien-lo_[AV], states that in the middle
of the eighteenth century, wild camels, as well as wild horses and
wild asses, still roamed over Eastern Turkestan. Hadji Chalfa, in his
Turkish Geography, written in the seventeenth century, speaks of the
very frequent hunting of the wild camel in the high plains of Kashgar,
Turfan, and Khotan. Schott finds in the writings of a Chinese author,
Ma-dschi, that wild camels exist in the countries north of China and
west of the basin of the Hoang-ho, in Ho-si or Tangut. Cuvier[AW]
alone doubts the present existence of wild camels in the interior of
Asia. He believes that they have merely “become wild;” since Calmucks,
and others professing kindred Buddhist doctrines, set camels and other
animals at liberty, in order “to acquire to themselves merit for the
other world.” The Ailanitic Gulf of the Nabatheans was the home of the
wild Arabian camel, according to Greek witnesses of the times of
Artemidorus and Agatharchides of Cnidus.[AX] The discovery of fossil
camel-bones of the ancient world in the Sewalik hills (which are
projecting spurs of the Himalaya range), by Captain Cautley and Dr.
Falconer, in 1834, is especially worthy of notice. These remains were
found with antediluvian bones of mastodons, true elephants, giraffes,
and a gigantic land tortoise (_Colossochelys_), twelve feet in length
and six feet in height.[AY] This camel of the ancient world has been
named _Camelus sivalensis_, although it does not show any great
difference from the still living Egyptian and Bactrian camels with one
and two humps.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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