Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/205

Rh even though, like the Frenchman in the same old apologue, yon only go to the Jardin des Plantes for the model on which you base your rhapsodical portrait. But when a man has actually been to Africa itself, and seen a caravan in all its glory, headed by a real live Arab in a burnous of the dirtiest, fresh from the sands and siroccos of the desert—who, I should like to know, if not he, is entitled to speak with authority about camels? For here I am, on the borders of the desert, upon whose flats I can look down (at a safe distance) from yonder mountain-heights; and if ever there was a case of "adaptation to the environment," the camel has indeed adapted himself wholly and solely to the conditions of Sahara.

Deserts, in fact, are exacting in the matter of adaptation; you must obey them or die. No other environment (not even perhaps the arctic snows) demands so much in the way of adaptiveness from all that live in it. The plants are every one of them saline and alkaline; they must content themselves with sand instead of soil, and with brackish pools instead of fresh water. The animals are all peculiar to their habitat; bird and insect must assume alike the uniform gray sabelline tint of external nature everywhere around them. Only two higher types subsist at all among those great sand-wastes—two types specially fitted for their own exceptional mode of life, one plant and one animal—the date-palm and the camel. They make Sahara. Nobody ever saw a picture of the desert without a date-palm and a camel in the foreground. Those two inseparable elements of the Africa of our fancy shall not be parted even in this sober biological sketch. Nature, indeed, has joined them together, and science shall not be permitted here to put them asunder.

And yet, though the camel as we know him is peculiarly Saharan, a product of the great African, Indian, and Bactrian deserts, it is not to the Old World that we must look at all if we wish to evolve the camel historically, rather than to develop him by a priori process from the depths of our own inner consciousness. It is America that gives us geologically the earliest evidence of the camel's ancestors; and it is America that still contains the greater number of species of the camel family, in the persons of the llama, the alpaca, the guanaco, and their allies. Prof. Cope has drawn up the pedigree of the race for us in full detail. The Asiatic and African camels, in fact, are mere surviving Oriental members of a family American in origin and history, but stranded, as it were, in a remote corner of the Old World, where they have survived the competition of newer and higher types in virtue of their special minor adaptations to the peculiar circumstances of their strange habitat. Having early fitted themselves in certain outer points to desert conditions, they have been enabled to outlive all their