It is an Asiatic animal, and is said still to roam wild in the desert of Shamo, on the frontiers of China. It is capable of being acclimated, without much difficulty, in comparatively northern countries, and was introduced into Tuscany by the Grand Duke Leopold, where it still breeds in the maremmas of the Pisan territory. It has, however, neither spread over the country, nor become at all extensively useful for the general purposes of rural labour. This is chiefly attributed to the improvident calculations of the minister Salviati, who on their first introduction demanded about a thousand francs a-piece from such as inclined to purchase these animals for the sake of extending the breed. They are frequently seen in the streets of Pisa, carrying fire-wood, or other articles of domestic consumption, from the present Grand Duke's farms. It is this species which is employed in Thibet and Turkistan.

The other species of camel (C. dromedarius) has only a single hump on its back. It has spread from Arabia all over the northern parts of Africa, and has long been essential to the commerce of those dry and desert regions. It is also found in Syria, Persia, &c., and was known under the name of Arabian camel to the ancient writers. The term dromedary (from the Greek gouàs), originally applied to a variety of this species, remarkable for its swiftness, as the name imports, is now for the most part bestowed on the species itself.

"To the wild Arab of the desert, the camel is all that his necessities require. He feeds on the flesh, drinks the milk, makes clothes and tents of the hair; belts, sandals, saddles, and buckets, of the

hide; he conveys himself and family on his back, makes his pillow of his side, and his shelter of him against the whirlwind of sand. Couched in a circle around him, his camels form a fence, and in battle an intrenchment, behind which his family and property are obstinately, and often successfully defended. All these advantages are a necessary result of the constitutional faculties and structure of the camel when residing in the locality assigned him by nature: under another atmosphere, his qualifications become less important, and his conformation less applicable. In Tartary and Southern Russia, where the Bactrian species (longer of body and shorter of limb than the Arabian) is harnessed to wheelcarriages, and even to the plough, the elevation of his shoulders evidently produces a waste of strength; and, in a country where herbage and water are proportionally abundant, his sobriety is not required. If the camel is transferred to rocky and mountainous regions, his feet soon wear, and he ascends and descends with great awkwardness. If he be brought into temperate regions, the frequent mud, and above all, the thawed snows, soften his feet, and he is unable to work; as is at least partially experienced in Central and Northern Asia, notwithstanding that the Bactrian camel, again provided by nature for his particular locality, has soles of greater hardness than the Arabian, and the dissolution of the snow is excessively rapid when once begun."-Griffith's Animal Kingdom, vol. iv. p. 40.

The ancient authors do not seem to take notice of the camel as an inhabitant of Northern Africa. It is, however, mentioned in Genesis, (chap. xii. ver. 16.) as among the gifts bestowed by Pharaoh on

Abram, and must therefore have been well known on the banks of the Nile at a period anterior to the oldest of the Greek or Roman writers. It has indeed been remarked as a singular circumstance, that the Romans who carried on such frequent wars in Africa, should not have thought of mentioning these animals, till Procopius noticed camel-riding Moors in arms against Solomon, the lieutenant of Belisarius. Their uses in modern times are so well known, and all books of African travel are so frequent in their description of these docile beasts of burden, that we deem it unnecessary to dwell any longer on the subject.

Very few animals of the deer kind, properly so called, are found in Africa. The red deer, however, (Cervus elaphrus) one of the noblest of the tribe, and the most stately of all the wild animals still indigenous to Britain, occurs in some of its northern quarters. But to these it was not improbably imported, at some unknown period, from Europe.

Before proceeding to the more abundant family of the antelopes, of which Africa is the great emporium, we shall mention, as a species entirely peculiar to this continent, the giraffe or camelopard, the tallest and, in every other respect, one of the most singular of quadrupeds. Its appearance is too familiar to our readers to require description. We shall merely state that it is a 'timid and gentle animal, feeding principally on the leaves of trees (especially those of the genus Mimosa), and inhabiting the plains of Central and Southern Africa. Its gait, or mode of progression, is described as extraordinary by Mr Lichtenstein. "We had scarcely

travelled an hour when the Hottentots called our attention to some object on a hill not far off on the left hand, which seemed to move. The head of something appeared almost immediately after, feeding on the other side of the hill, and it was concluded that it must be that of a very large animal. This was confirmed, when after going scarcely a hundred steps farther, two tall swan-necked giraffes stood almost directly before us. Our transports were indescribable, particularly as the creatures themselves did not perceive us, and therefore gave us full time to examine them, and to prepare for an earnest and serious chase. The one was smaller and of a paler colour than the other, which Vischer immediately pronounced to be a colt, the child of the larger. Our horses were saddled, and our guns loaded in an instant, when the chase commenced. Since all the wild animals of Africa run against the wind, so that we were pretty well assured which way the course of these objects of our ardent wishes would be directed, Vischer, as the most experienced hunter, separated himself from us, and by a circuit took the animals in front, that he might stop their way, while I was to attack them in the rear. I had almost got within shot of them when they perceived me, and began to fly in the direction we expected. But their flight was so beyond all idea extraordinary, that, between laughter, astonishment, and delight, I almost forgot my designs upon the harmless creatures' lives. From the extravagant disproportion between the height of the fore to that of the hinder parts, and of the height to the length of the animal, great obstacles are presented to its moving with any degree of swiftness. When Le Vaillant asserts that he has seen the gi

*

raffe trot, he spares me any farther trouble in proving that this animal never presented itself alive before him. How, in the world, should an animal, so disproportioned in height before and behind, trot? The giraffe can only gallop, as I can affirm from my own experience, having seen between forty and fifty at different times, both in their slow and hasty movement, for they only stop when they are feeding quietly. But this gallop is so heavy and unwieldy, and seems performed with so much labour, that in a distance of more than a hundred paces, comparing the ground cleared with the size of the animal and of the surrounding objects, it might almost be said that a man goes faster on foot. The heaviness of the movement is only compensated by the length of the steps, each one of which clears, on a moderate computation, from twelve to sixteen feet." A tolerably good horse overtakes the giraffe without difficulty, especially over rising ground.

Camelopards were known to the Romans, and were exhibited in the Circæan Games by Cæsar the dictator. The Emperor Gordian afterwards exhibited ten at a single show; and tolerably accurate figures of this animal, both in a browsing and grazing attitude, have been handed down by the Prænestine pavement. During the darker ages, and for some centuries after the revival of learning, it seems to have remained unknown to Europeans; but, about the middle of the sixteenth century, the

* It would be more proper, and equally logical, rather to infer that Le Vaillant misapplied the term which he made use of to designate the movements of the camelopard, than that he imagined himself to have seen an animal alive which had never presented itself to him in that condition.-ED.